Re: [-empyre-] COVID 19 Movement III: Presto

[Christina McPhee]

--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Patty—you  inspire a presto search for that sonata
Writing about this grief and torment is far from easy - thank you for three
powerful  movements and moments 
A grateful reader,
C

On Wed, Apr 29, 2020 at 8:17 AM Patricia Zimmermann 
wrote:

> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> *COVID 19 Movement III: Presto*
>
> Only the recent books on documentary history and analysis could be found
> as e-books, according to our librarians at Ithaca College.  The theoretical
> books in critical ethnography, critical historiography, theory were
> confined to hard copy.  Our librarians ordered every e-book on documentary
> they could find, squeezing out budget from small cracks so my students in
> my History and Theory of Documentary class could have some readings.
> Plenty of books on new media theory had been published as ebooks, so that
> covered part of my class, but not the abstract part, the meta.
>
> The college had shutdown. We had one week to "migrate" our courses to
> "remote instruction."  Words from administrators and not from faculty.
> COVID meant shelter-in-place. No more F2F classes as they have come to be
> called.  F2F, a phantom, a phantasmatic, a fantasy in this COVID world of
> invisible viruses, illness, death, and screens.  Migration from the
> embodied sensorium of the classroom to the emphemerality of screens. From
> three dimensions to two. From a world of chiararscuro to flat.
>
> The great migration as some have called it came with a great work speed
> up.  Many colleges, including my own, insisted on propagating ideas about
> "student centered," a neoliberal construct of consumerism and comfort
> displacing the messiness of ideas and debate.  A dangerous shift from the
> collective to the individual, from the abstract to feelings.  To be student
> centered, we should be synchronous, stay in touch with our students, send
> emails, be available on Zoom open office hours, understand. These
> ideologies ignored what faculty had to do:  redesign and restructure and
> reconceptualize courses in a new interface, a new format, under almost
> impossible conditions. And all of us, whether at elite schools, public
> universities, or third rate four year private colleges had to do it fast.
>
> Presto, I thought.  Very fast.  Tumultuous.  A forward driving rhythm with
> contrapuntal tension.  Presto.
>
> I scrambled to cut films and new media projects out of my syllabus, not to
> make the course easier, but to respect the labor of our librarian who
> digitized titles for Sakai. He was swamped by requests from across campus.
> He was digitizing ten hours plus a day to get it all done.
>
> When the Governor instituted PAUSE which shut down everything, this
> librarian brought in back packs and shopping bags to pack up all the DVD
> titles faculty needed, and many external drives.  He would digitize from
> home.  I cut and pruned and honed, trimming down titles.  I convinced
> myself that instead of my carefully curated sequencing of films and new
> media to use juxtapositions to jolt students into ideas through shock or
> through pleasure, I needed a new plan.  The curatorial plan would not work
> online.
>
>  So I brainwashed myself into thinking this could now be a "slow read,"  a
> deep dive into close readings of the texts.  In fact, Tim Murray, our
> comrade here on Empyre, even offered an argument that all undergraduates
> need to learn to read films and new media carefully on a formal level of
> textual analysis, so this was in fact, not defeat, but a good thing, a
> cleansing in a way, a paring down to what matters.
>
> I started to play Mozart's Sonata in A Minor during this scramble to
> transition my courses to online.  Written in 1778, it commemorated his
> mother's death, a mix of pounding repetitive chords and flying lines of
> fast notes, then a gorgeous sweeet andante movement, and the third
> movement, presto.  Tumultous, surging dynamics.  Juxtapositions of loud and
> soft, rage and sweetness.  The sonata sits as only one of two Mozart sonata
> in a minor key. I realized this so-called mass migration to remote learning
> catapulted me and other colleagues into presto.  Not the kind identified
> with magic shows, but presto, fast, furious, contrapuntal.
>
> But, as we say in critical historiographic theory,  there is the straight
> story and then there is the crooked story.  The straight story seemed to
> emanate from administrators emphasizing access to media technologies,
> teaching synchronously, simply transposing what we do in classrooms in a
> large media school to an online environment.  It meant an uncritical
> technofetishism of workshops, tutorials, webinars on various gadgets and
> interfaces that disguised the anxieties, work speed ups, and conceptual
> work.
>
> All to keep it ALL THE SAME, as though nothing had happened and as though
> the Zoom screen did not flatten our affect and 

Re: [-empyre-] Bio-Fascism: Eclipse of the Social /Decline of Politics -- question marks

[Christina McPhee]

--empyre- soft-skinned space-->
> dear Johannes and all,
>


> Thanks so much for your queries about my Shapeshifters drawings. I
> apologize, I've been away designing a book for days on end and nearly
> disappeared into the computer.
>


> The works Johannes is referring to were introduced in week one; the link
> to images is
>


http://www.christinamcphee.net/category/projects/1-2-shapeshifters-drawings-2020



>  Johannes wrote:
>


> "These are very large 'Shapeshifters' - Christina, and they seem a mixture
> or assemblage of organic forms or elements and the digital, digital
> refrains,  can you please tell us more about how Sor Juana's writings or
> compositions inspired you, and whether you felt the solitude of a monastic
> cell was also implying something gritty/resilient for you (Sor Juana had
> visitors and a lover, I gathered from "Sor Juana and the Chambered
> Nautilus", a theatrical staging and reembodiment I saw last year at MECA,
> Houston),…”
>


> I started drawing from the Enigmas with small studies over a year ago in
> March 2019. I had fallen in love with a translation by Stalina Emmanuelle
> Villarreal (2015). Gritty sound clashes in English, against and toward the
> elegant twisted original in Spanish. Readers like me find her short, tweet
> length questions rich in possible answers and none.
>


> As for lovers, Sor Juana keeps us on the wrong foot : she asks,  “What can
> be the favor / that by secret virtue/  if reached is rued/ and if awaited,
> feared?” (Joanna Newsom: “Time is a symptom of love.”) Temporality is a
> symptom of eros, an overloading of circuits, intensification between two or
> more nodes. Stalina writes about this effect in the task of translation:
> “In essence, to maintain structural integrity employs a series of
> simulaneous parallels, like a string of double helix carrying Sor Juana’s
> and my blood to donate to a reader’s pulse.”
>


>
>
https://uglyducklingpresse.org/publications/enigmas/
>

 Symbolically then, we find tranverse, helix crossings between our love of
the Earth, and our overwhelming desire for both future climate change
mitigation and human survival, over against how that ‘favor’ — of suddenly
clean air and burgeoning wildlife, elk herds on the beaches near Portland,
all this — is achieved by a terrible ‘secret virtue’ (the coronavirus’s
monstrous algorithms by which it generates new genetic code in our carrier
bodies remains obscure)—and, ‘if reached is rued’ (we are in global
quarantine for the foreseeable)— and, ‘if awaited, feared?’ — fearing that
art and community despite all reasonable efforts (pace Simon Taylor) could
all die soon...

>
> http://www.christinamcphee.net/captivating-reason-cautivando-la-razon/
>
>
>
So yes although I had already been studying the poems for a year, it was
> not until after they were installed in their current un-viewable show in
> LA, that the force of affiliating to her poetry seems ‘an even more
> inspiring premonition?’ I think though that we must collectively develop
> resistances through works of art, as Premesh Lalu was so inspired, by the
> amazing Francis Darby painting, “The Opening of the Sixth Seal” in the
> Irish National Gallery. I find Premesh’s  inductive hypothesis, around
> temporal contiguous events around abolition of slavery in at least  parts
> of the world and simultaneously the production of this painting of Darby’s
> circa 1828, very speculative in the best way: “The Danby painting,
> completed in 1828, converged with the abolition of slavery in the Caribbean
> and the Cape and coincided with a revolution in scientific communication
> that proved to be indispensable in the genealogy of race upon which
> apartheid rested…Would it give us a new perspective on race and how to deal
> with our concomitant biological fragility?” (This question also reminds me
> of the installation films of John Akomfrah like“Purple”, 2017.)
>
>
>  Johannes goes on to tell me: “I was trying to read your "Caminando al
> tormento" in light of Premesh Lalu refering us to apartheid and less good
> ideas (thanks for making me look at Season 1 and the performances in
> Kentridge's & Pahla O.Phala's curation), and the painting by Francis Danby
> titled *The Opening of the Sixth Seal* (1828)."
> http://onlinecollection.nationalgallery.ie/objects/3074/the-opening-of-the-sixth-seal?ctx=35e4b97d-3d9d-4603-ae78-d4f762a24033=1
>
>
>
>
> Johannes is referring to this drawing, “Caminando al tormento / Trekking
> towards a hellish plight”  :
> http://www.christinamcphee.net/trekking-toward-a-hellish-plight-caminando-al-tormento/
>
>
>
>  Just for fun, here’s the ‘primary text’ from which “The Opening of the
> Seventh Seal” derives, and is some kind of ur-source for mine. The passage
> about the sixth seal occurs in the Apocalypse of St John the Divine:
>
>
> “Then I watched as he broke the sixth seal. And there was a violent
> earthquake: the sun turned black as a funeral pall and the 

[-empyre-] from the book of questions in honor of passover in the time of plague

[Christina McPhee]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--"Do we have a tale here? "
"My story has been told so many times."
"What is your story?"
"Ours, insofar as it is absent."
"I do not understand."
"Speaking tortures me."
"Where are you?"
"In what I say."
"What is your truth?"
"What lacerates me."
"And your salvation?"
"Forgetting what I said."
"May I come in? It is getting dark."
"In each words there burns a wick."
"May I come in ? It is getting dark around my soul."
"It is dark around me, too."
"What can you do for me?"
"Your share of luck is in yourself."
"Writing for the sake of writing does nothing but show contempt."
"Man is a written bond and place."
"I hate what is said in places I have left behind."
"You trade in the future, which is immediately translated. What you have
left is you without you."
"You oppose me to myself. How could I ever win this fight?"

Edmond Jabes, The Book of Questions, Vol. 1. "At the Threshold of the
Book."

Happy Passover.
___
empyre forum
empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
http://empyre.library.cornell.edu

Re: [-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 2]

[Christina McPhee]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Dear Audrey and Francisco of FRAUD-
How great to have the chance to bring this intervention on lichen, the
incalculable /-financialization abstractions, and forest culture into the
heart of London at Somerset House. Please could you describe the physical
attributes of your installation (?) - how you are carrying these ideas into
the space ?
Thanks

Christina

On Sun, Jun 10, 2018 at 3:09 PM FRAUD  wrote:

> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Dear all,
>
> We are delighted to join the network discussion (and with such great
> company!).
> Some little bits to begin.
>
> *Networks:*
> In our case, we are interested in the materiality and necropolitics of the
> network and critical ecologies. Of late, we have been thinking through the
> finantialisation of nature through emission trading systems and green
> bonds. We are producing a genealogy of the conception of the forest as a
> space of carbon flows which has carbon circulation, exchange and storage as
> a nominal abstractions. Emission trading and green markets are popping up
> globally (China just started its own), it is predicted to be the biggest
> trading market by 2020. Carbon Futures is a speculative valuation system
> that captures and extracts 'natural resources'. We are also inquiring into
> how these markets are networked and we are investigating what is obfuscated
> by this abstraction (cultural conflicts, subaltern knowledges and
> environmental violence). Happy to expand, also we have a show opening
> Tuesday in London on this topic :) [
> https://www.somersethouse.org.uk/whats-on/complex-values].
>
> *The incomputable:*
> During related research (in the Finnish forests) we were fascinated about
> the reindeer lichen in East Fennoscandia, a disappearing species that
> problematises the management of industrial forestry in Finland. Generally
> lichen species are interesting because they constitute the majority of
> diversity in the northern forests--there are only 5 tree species, whereas
> there are thousands of lichens. Being a composite of a algae or
> cyanobacteria and a fungi, their genetic make-up is more exposed to
> mutation, hence diversity. They also have an interesting cultural relevance
> as both a delicacy and a famine food. Lichen presents itself as an
> non-computer readable element in the forestry modelling calculations. While
> the efficiency of industrial forests is heralded, validating the move to
> increase production and cutting down of trees, 'inefficient' old growth
> forests provide essential elements such as beard moss the source of food
> for reindeer in winter. The post World War massive clear cutting in the
> north and subsequent forestry is a scarification leaving Finland with
> approximately 5% of its old growth forest. Calculations have deemed
> industrial forests more efficient in terms of carbon sequestration, and
> consequently enriches the Finnish economy with carbon credits. In addition,
> forestry growth provides jobs and fuels many by-product economies. We
> explore these complex entanglements and scales of power. How are forests
> calculated? Which forms of knowledge are privileged in this discussion?
> What is deemed an acceptable compromise/sacrifice? How does one begin to
> discuss the simultaneous cultural livelihood and destruction of a nation?
>
> Also, something to throw out there, there is an interesting tension
> between the incomputable, the uncapturable, as a method of resistance and
> survival, as well as disappearance/extinction from the network.
>
> "[P]ower is in fact grounded in the very ability to calculate, count,
> measure, balance and act on these calculations. Inversely to make oneself
> ungovernable one much make oneself incalculable, immeasurable uncountable"
> [Eyal Weizman:
> https://www.e-flux.com/journal/38/61213/665-the-least-of-all-possible-evils/]
>
>
>
> *A footnote on invasive / native* (mentioned last week):
> Those definitions in themselves are quite problematic. Usually there is a
> point in time after which a species' arrival is determined to be invasive.
> That point is heavily imbued in politics of immigration, colonialism and
> other ways of viewing the world that have little to do with the plant or
> animal's 'threat'. Without expanding further here, we did a project
> exploring this some time ago, Dreaming in tongues/舌頭/langues/
> بألسنة/tunger, and Cooking Sections do great work on this subject.
>
> Look forward to continuing the discussion over the week.
>
> Audrey & Francisco of FRAUD
>
>
>
> On 09/06/2018 10:41, Shu Lea Cheang wrote:
>
> dear all
>
> It seems like our week1 focus on Mycelium network is just heating up, i am
> sure we will be coming back to reflect on mycelium's network nature...
>
> Now we enter  rehearsal of a network - [week 2], with a focus on networked
> activism and performance.
>
> We are interested in reviewing a glory past/present/future with  update on
> 

Re: [-empyre-] Introduction

[Christina McPhee]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Reading about Mai-ling’s architectural design work in the Liverpool
Biennial suddenly reminds me of some superb and whimsical mycelium
furniture by DEZEEN - by chance encountered at the London Design Week show
at Somerset House last September 2017:

https://www.dezeen.com/2017/09/20/mushroom-mycelium-timber-suede-like-furniture-sebastian-cox-ninela-ivanova-london-design-festival/


— on the commercial end of design research ...

Bests

Christina







On Fri, Jun 8, 2018 at 8:06 AM High, Kathy  wrote:

> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Dear empyre Community!
>
> Greetings. And forgive my delayed introduction, but I have been traveling.
> Thank you Renate and Tim for your continued dedication to empyre and
> keeping it going as a community based discussion! And thank you Shu Lea for
> pulling us fungal types all together!
>
> By way of introduction I would like to talk about the project that I am
> currently coordinating called NATURE Lab. NATURE Lab stands for North Troy
> Art, Technology and Urban Research in Ecology. This project started about 6
> years ago in tandem with an amazing community media arts organization that
> I have been on the board of directors for the past 13 years called The
> Sanctuary for Independent Media. The Sanctuary started in an old church in
> North Central Troy, New York, about 150 miles north of New York City in a
> post-industrial city that is at the head of the Hudson River. At The
> Sanctuary, we have dedicated our energies to develop a space for
> independent voices, politics and art creation in a neighborhood that is
> economically and environmentally devastated. We have created a local
> “campus" repurposing abandoned lots and buildings (think Detroit). We have
> an ongoing presentation series of music, film and speakers, a low power FM
> radio station with local news shows, youth media and environmental
> education workshops, and have planted multiple gardens and food forests.
>
> Situated one block from the Hudson River, we find our location adjacent to
> brownfields, industrial waste remains and an abundance of toxic lead soil.
> NATURE Lab seeks to understand and remediate this urban landscape and
> create new resources and inspiration in the urban ecologies around us. We
> have just purchased an old building (this is among three others that we
> have) for $7500. We will develop this space into the home for NATURE Lab,
> with a community bio science lab offering ongoing workshops and eco-artist
> projects to create a sense of our surroundings and an appreciation for our
> ruderal ecologies.
>
> When Shu Lea came to us this past spring with the idea of joining the
> Mycelium Network Society, we jumped at the chance to do so. I have been
> close to Shu Lea since the 1980s when we were in NYC together. As my own
> media work has shifted to a focus on bioart, and ecological systems and
> concerns, the opportunity to collaborate with a rhizomic network of
> nurturing like minds seemed perfect. The work I have done with mycelium has
> been around soil remediation. Five years ago the eco-artist Oliver
> Kellhammer was in residence at NATURE Lab. Oliver is a permaculturist and
> artist who works extensively with plighted environments thinking about
> re-growth and recovery – the symbiont relationships that we all need to
> consider now. We used mycelium as an accumulator in a toxic soil bed – and
> it was truly successful. But what to do with that material in the end is a
> question we still struggle with!
>
> Going forward, an architect Mae-Ling Lokko, who teaches in the
> Architecture School at my university (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)
> will be working with NATURE Lab to think through mycelium’s strengths. Mae
> is in UK at present for the Liverpool Biennial using mycelium for an
> exhibition at RIBA. Mae is interested in thinking about “how to develop a
> staged performance piece on the ‘natural decay’ of the mycelium structure
> that is built in Liverpool as the focus for a project for the Mycelium
> Network Society.” She has made a 20 foot tunnel with mycelium panels and is
> “ thinking about how to use this opportunity to ‘stage’ [the mycelium’s]
> graceful return into the environment.”
>
> I thank Shu Lea for this opportunity to join forces and share our creative
> energies! Also thank you to everyone for your wonderful posts to date.
> More to come, Kathy
>
>
>
>
> ___
> empyre forum
> empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
___
empyre forum
empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
http://empyre.library.cornell.edu

Re: [-empyre-] In memory of Marilouise Kroker 1943-2018

[Christina McPhee]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hi —

Marilouiae and Arthur were amazing out of the blue editors and publishers
of my artist writings on CTheory and in two subsequent edited books of new
media artists’ — theorists’ collected essays - I’m sure you all treasure
them too. They reached out to me -/ It was all really “mana from heaven” -
a dystopian one at that !I will always be grateful and in their debt. I
remember Marilouise as quiet, elegant, intense, and kind. A careful
listener. Thanks for organizing this tribute, Renate.



Christina


www.christincphee.net


On Fri, Jun 1, 2018 at 3:14 PM micha cárdenas  wrote:

> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Hello all,
>
> This is such sad news, that we have lost such a visionary woman. I had the
> good fortune of meeting Marilouise and Arthur at U Vic for the C Theory
> Critical Digital Studies Workshop in 2009, I believe. They created such an
> incredible visionary space that deeply inspired me and my work. CTheory and
> the Critical Digital Studies reader were such a powerful inspiration to me,
> as both deeply engaged with emerging technologies and also deeply critical
> of capitalism's death drive. I am so lucky to have gotten to meet her
> briefly and worked with her on both of those two projects. She will be
> dearly missed. Sending love to you Arthur!
>
> warmly,
>
>   micha
>
>
>
>
> On Mon, May 28, 2018 at 7:01 PM, Eduardo Navas 
> wrote:
>
>> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
>> My condolences to Arthur Kroker. I was never able to meet Marilouise
>> Kroker, but I always admired her and Arthur Kroker's contribution to the
>> field of new media. C-Theory was one of the first new media/digital media
>> journals I read, and it influenced my early education in college and grad
>> studies. Words can never do justice to acknowledge the loss of people who
>> shape our world. I am honestly sad to hear the news.
>>
>> Eduardo Navas
>>
>> On Sun, May 27, 2018 at 7:32 PM, Sergio Basbaum 
>> wrote:
>>
>>> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
>>> What a loss.
>>>
>>> Thank you for sharing such sad news.
>>>
>>> We're here in Brazil under great chaos, but we still have tears to cry
>>> for those who gave a contribuition for our understanding of our times.
>>>
>>> My feelings from Brazil
>>>
>>> s
>>>
>>> On Sun, May 27, 2018 at 2:49 AM, Shu Lea Cheang 
>>> wrote:
>>>
 --empyre- soft-skinned space--

 my condolence.

 Arthur and Marilouise Kroker's CTHEORY editions have been great resources 
 for my research... I have never had chance to meet her(them) in person. 
 but did have a few email exchanges throughout the years. The news of 
 Marilouise's passing found me reading an article, The ambiguous 
 Panopticon: Foucault and the codes of cyberspace by Mark Winokur published 
 on ctheory 13/3/2003. having the thought about their persistant engagement 
 with critical media studies. Bon voyage through the liquid crystal blue 
 sky, trust you have arrived at "pure data heaven" by way of exit#alt, dear 
 Marilouise.

 sl


 On 27/05/18 04:37, Renate Terese Ferro wrote:

 --empyre- soft-skinned space--
 Thanks Tim and Ana, If there are others of you who have thoughts or 
 memories about Marilouise Kroker please post.  We will keep this thread 
 open until the 31st of May.
 Renate

 Renate Ferro
 Visiting Associate Professor
 Director of Undergraduate Studies
 Department of Art
 Tjaden Hall 306rfe...@cornell.edu



 On 5/26/18, 2:04 PM, "empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf 
 of Timothy Conway Murray" 
  
  
  
 wrote:

 --empyre- soft-skinned space--
 What a shock it was to learn of Marilouise Kroker’s death on Tuesday 
 after an extremely short illness.  Renate and I have so valued our years 
 of friendship and collaboration with Marilouise.  As Renate mentioned, it 
 was very much the influence of Arthur and Marilouise that urged us to join 
 in collaboration for –empyre- and other writing and curatorial projects 
 after firmly keeping our work separate for the first period of our 
 professional lives together, when Renate would work separately in her 
 studio and I would write my stuff across the house in my study, only to 
 meet in the middle of house at the end of the day to share our creations.  
 Marilouise and Arthur helped us to understand that it could be exciting 
 and creative to share our voices in public.  Strangely the other couple 
 similarly influencing us were Helen and Newton Harrison, with Helen also 
 leaving us in April (at 90, with a good fifteen years of more production 
 than Marilouise would be granted).

 Marilouise 

Re: [-empyre-] -empyre- in 2002- a trip down memory lane

[Christina McPhee]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Thanks, Renate, for the comments around the aesthetics of early days
-empyre- and the quote in which I compare -empyre- to an Ant Farm
inflatable!

When I started moderating in 2002,  I sometimes posted as Christina McPhee
and sometimes as naxsmash-- a made-up portmanteau of 'birthing' and
'smashing' . Neither name indexed a definite identity. That seemed to be
the disorder of the day: you could scatter your texts to many eyes and ears
out of reach of one's own sense of place --- I felt unbound by my gender or
age or other markers. When the Documenta curator Georg Schollhamer
contacted me to invite -empyre- to Documenta 12 Magazine project in 2006,
he asked to meet up with me at the Sydney Biennial. On the phone, I madly
searched and stumbled for an answer, wondering, OMG, how am i going to
afford to go to Sydney to meet Georg and discuss this wonderful invite?
Quickly I recovered and confessed that I was not Australian... this is the
kind of delightful mistake possible in those days. Melinda Rackham had been
so kind to invite me into the 'soft-skinned space' to moderate in 2002 when
her doctoral writing was very pressing. I stayed on and learned from
everyone for the next six years. It was the best education one could
possibly imagine, boot-strapped by the constant demand of coming up with
new topics and generating new convos with such diverse artists, scientists,
poets, writers of all kinds. They inadvertently generated my crash-course
education in Franz Fanon, Julia Kristeva, Anthropophagia and Tropicalia,
Edouard Glissante, Australian/NZ Cyberfeminism. I read like mad. I
encouraged posts in languages other than English whenever the writer found
that her ideas might need to flow from a non-English space-- then
translated as best i could or found translators of the human variety to
help out. We had a freewheeling time of it. "New Media" was in its heyday.
I always hoped that the archive would help historians with bits and sparks
to illuminate a fascinating transitional period... an Arcades project...

Christina




On Fri, Feb 2, 2018 at 9:01 PM, Theresa Ramseyer <tlr28...@gmail.com> wrote:

> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Evening,
>
> My computer-internet connection is still dial-up. It is unusable for
> the moment, for various reasons. My phone is now my main connection,
> but I can't get everything. Instagram, for example, is always a blank
> page. Many times I'll click on a link and get nowhere.
>
>
> I prefer Empyre as a listserve. I have gone back through previous
> discussions and looked up artists, followed threads and ideas when I
> had time. I've gone deeper; the list moves fast for me.
>
>
> It's much easier to find a post on gmail or yahoo than to dig through
> Facebook.
>
>
> I know Empyre has a Facebook presence, and Facebook is easy to reach
> on my phone. But besides the searching difficulties, Facebook changes
> their algorithims so often that I keep lists of my "must read" pages
> and communities. It's annoying, to say the least.
>
> Theresa Ramseyer
> ___
> empyre forum
> empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>
___
empyre forum
empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
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Re: [-empyre-] Welcome to Week 2 on Contamination

[Christina McPhee]

 visual strategies they imapped  the
>> microsopic contamination of their narratives.  We took multiple projectors
>> and projected their simulated models on bodies and surfaces interjecting
>> them back into the environment as a final intervention. The simplified
>> prompt I gave to these 1st year art students prompted engaging discussions
>> about health and safety, politics, the environment, language, truth, and
>> more not to mention to resulting creative visual interventions.
>>
>> I have attached a couple of images here. Hoping you will share more about
>> your ideas of  media, viruses, and panic this week.
>> Welcome back Christina McPHee who should be joining us tomorrow.
>>
>> Renate
>>
>>
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[-empyre-] Coda: Carolyn Castaño

[Christina McPhee]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--

carolyn castaño: favorite quote

"My most recent bodies of work are all encounters with themes and images 
originating in our hemisphere’s narco-­‐trafficking milieu and armed conflicts, 
with a particular emphasis on how gender and ecological concerns play out 
therein. These drawings and paintings mix materiality with content
in pieces that consider how the Latin American body and the Latin American 
landscape remain inextricably linked, even as their surrounding media and 
political contexts are increasingly digitized and globalized...

 The Female Report/ El Reporte Femenil explores the role of Latin American 
women in history and the media. In The Female Report/El Reporte Femenil, a 
single channel video which addresses perceptions of Latin American women in 
news and ‘infotainment’ culture through a simulated newscast exploring feminism 
and popular notions of Latina womanhood. Modeled after popular, female-anchored 
Spanish-language television news programs on Telemundo and Univision, El 
Reporte Femenil features a fictional newscaster, Silviana Godoy, “reporting” on 
the past and current status of women in Latin America. Godoy alternates between 
English and Spanish over the course of an extended, free-wheeling monologue, 
alighting on the accomplishments and downfalls of Latin American women. The 
Female Report/ El Reporte Femenil travels between English and Spanish and 
employs a tongue in cheek or comedic delivery that "reports" on the news or 
alternate history. The reporter Silvia Godoy interprets her own newscast 
switching from English to Spanish in an act that Brasilian writer Oswald De 
Andrade calls Antropofagia, she simultaneously consumes or eats her own words.

The Female Report/ El Reporte Femenil challenges or relocates the official 
feminist history ( one that is usually centered on the history makers from 
Europe and the US) by offering the names of key women in Latin American 
revolutions, art, and literature.

The Female Report/El Reporte Femenil  https://vimeo.com/41060029  “




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----



Christina McPhee
naxsm...@mac.com

http://christinamcphee.net






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Re: [-empyre-] Camera Obscura

[Christina McPhee]

--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Johanna, Thank you for this provocative suggestion, so strong I just want to 
highlight it for emphasis, as this is something we can do.

You write, "I would suggest that we explore our engagement with the camera 
obscura as a way to consider a theory of feminist perspective in which the 
monocular point of view is always subject to at least a splitting into two 
views, which cannot be reconciled. The principles of this Feminst Perspective 
would be to demonstrate and embody epistemological principles of situatedness 
(within cultural, historical, gendered, class-based, and other conditions), of 
partial knowledge (the parallax between two views demonstrates the processes of 
selection that give rise to a representation, rather than obscuring it), 
constructedness (the enunciative, aesthetic, deliberate decisions of making). 
To me, these are the foundation of a political epistemology that recognizes 
specificity in every instance, differentiation as fundamental to identity, and 
positionality as an explicit feature of human experience and expression.”



Christina






> On Jul 27, 2016, at 7:48 AM, Johanna Drucker  wrote:
> 
> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> All, 
> 
> Thanks for this excellent exchange, which is prompting me to take the 
> opportunity to comment.  I want to propose a theory of feminist perspective 
> as an extension of our group endeavor here. 
>  
> Some of you will recall that the feminist film journal founded in the 1970s 
> in Berkeley was named Camera Obscura. The title implied an engagement with 
> the analysis of the mechanisms of the cinematic apparatus, a phrase that 
> included psychoanalytic theory of subject formation, in combination with 
> feminist critiques. The image of the camera obscura, as well as the specific 
> technology by which it operates, inscribes a static monocular position as the 
> place from which and the place within which the image is produced. Early 
> images of the camera obscura all bear its masculinist origins in a optics and 
> mechanics that supports and reifies constructed perspective: depictions of 
> male artists in full mastery of their gaze, the world projected for them onto 
> a surface they control. Following Stephanie Strickland’s astute comments last 
> week, I would suggest that we explore our engagement with the camera obscura 
> as a way to consider a theory of feminist perspective in which the monocular 
> point of view is always subject to at least a splitting into two views, which 
> cannot be reconciled. The principles of this Feminst Perspective would be to 
> demonstrate and embody epistemological principles of situatedness (within 
> cultural, historical, gendered, class-based, and other conditions), of 
> partial knowledge (the parallax between two views demonstrates the processes 
> of selection that give rise to a representation, rather than obscuring it), 
> constructedness (the enunciative, aesthetic, deliberate decisions of making). 
> To me, these are the foundation of a political epistemology that recognizes 
> specificity in every instance, differentiation as fundamental to identity, 
> and positionality as an explicit feature of human experience and expression. 
>  
> I do not, however, think we can get to that place through images of the deep 
> penetration of a mechanical device through a domestic space that has been 
> softened with earth. Really? Please. That image is a parodic refutation of 
> our conversation here. Made me laugh, but that’s about it. 
>  
> For those interested in a bibliography of discussions of perspective and also 
> mechanical devices for optics, theories of vision, and other related matters, 
> here is a brief list of fundamental texts:
>  
> Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (finally translated 
> into English by Christopher Wood and published in 1997 by Zone Books)
> John White, Birth and rebirth of pictorial space
> Marilyn Bunim, Space in Medieval Painting
> Richard Lindberg, Theories of Vision
> Victor Burgin, “Geometry and Abjection,” still one of the best 
> pieces on subjectivity and vision. 
>   A good bibliography on devices, mechanical and visual, also exists 
> and Wolfgang Lefèvre's edited volume, Picturing Machines is a good place to 
> start on that. 
>  
> Much remains to be done to bring these historical models, critical concepts, 
> and feminist principles into an applied politics of 
> representation/construction of knowledge. Great to think that there is so 
> much interest among this diverse community of practioner-scholars.
> 
> Johanna
> 
> On Jul 26, 2016, at 9:49 PM, Cortez, Beatriz wrote:
> 
>> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
>> Hello again,
>> 
>> Since we are talking about the eye and vision, I wanted to share a few ideas 
>> that I have been 

Re: [-empyre-] Camera Obscura

[Christina McPhee]

er 
studio-shed marks the triple limits of domestic and public, social 
reproduction, and cultural production, the process of creation and the 
obligation of the market. The power and beauty of Shed Cubed rises from 
McPhee’s assertion of skill to mark the space-time of those limits — to 
articulate their chronotope. When McPhee traces the sun’s line on the shed 
walls, she captures an originary index of time, the sundial before sundials: 
she draws time passing in the problematic site of ma(r)king as cultural 
production which itself constitutes the limits of the domestic.”  
http://www.christinamcphee.net/on-christina-mcphees-shed-cubed-louis-georges-schwartz/

Beatriz, how does light work as a medium for ‘nomadic collective identities”— 
in the context of the Camera Obscura…. or is it too soon to tell ? 


my best

Christina


 




Christina McPhee
naxsm...@mac.com

http://christinamcphee.net






> On Jul 27, 2016, at 5:49 AM, Cortez, Beatriz <beatriz.cor...@csun.edu> wrote:
> 
> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Hello again,
> 
> Since we are talking about the eye and vision, I wanted to share a few ideas 
> that I have been thinking about as I have been putting together a proposal 
> for a site specific installation. My intention is to build a Camera Obscura:
> 
> Throughout history, philosophers have theorized about our perception of 
> reality. In the Ethics, and in his Letters, Baruch de Spinoza wrote about the 
> dislocation between the idea of man and the scientific idea of man. Marx also 
> wrote about a skewed version of reality in 1846, in The German Ideology. For 
> Marx, consciousness emerges out of the material conditions of existence. 
> Within that context, ideology functions as a Camera Obscura because it shows 
> an inverted perspective of reality. However, Marx believed in the possibility 
> of overcoming the distorted vision produced by ideology, in the possibility 
> of seeing reality as it actually is, of achieving objective vision. Wilfrid 
> Sellars stated in Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man, a lecture he 
> delivered at the University of Pittsburgh in 1960, that the "manifest image 
> is a refinement or sophistication of what might be called the 'original' 
> image; a refinement to a degree which makes it relevant to the contemporary 
> intellectual scene" (7). In other words, for Sellars, the original image 
> gained content as it was placed in relation to the historical context of 
> Western philosophy. In this sense, the manifest image was based on the 
> construction of the concept of a "person" (10), a concept that is linked to 
> one of the most prevalent ideas of Western philosophy, the idea of the 
> transcendental identity of man. For Sellars, however, the combination of the 
> manifest image and the scientific image has the potential of producing a 
> stereoscopic vision, a virtual reality of sorts. As Ray Brassier explains in 
> Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, Sellars' concept of the manifest 
> image is inscribed within humanist (5-6). Brassier is interested in Sellars' 
> stereoscopic vision, as he strives to move beyond historically conditioned 
> meaning," and therefore, towards other speculative possibilities that are 
> beyond humanism, beyond a transcendental construction of identity, and that 
> are closer to what Rosi Braidotti calls nomadic collective identities. 
> 
> 
> 
> Beatriz Cortez
> Http://www.beatrizcortez.com
> http://www.csun.edu/humanities/central-american-studies/beatriz-cortez
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Re: [-empyre-] Post #3 After critique and the politics of capta

[Christina McPhee]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Dissembling, passing-as, representing-as-if…….. Johanna Drucker puts so well 
the condition we are blind to and yet complicit in

"The politics of capta, therefore, are the cultural politics of all semiosis, 
in which the fundamental processes of sense-making and sign systems come into 
being so that they pass themselves off as "what is" rather than "what has been 
represented to appear to be what is". Such a politics is always freighted with 
the baggage of any and every hegemony at work, and the "nothing is ever/never 
natural" assertion has to be taken literally here as a way to undo the easy 
habit of familiar thought. For though we "know" that data is constructed, we do 
not always know how that knowing encodes the blindness that keeps unfamiliarity 
at bay, keeps the "otherness" of the world at a distance in all of its true 
profundity.”

To ‘undo the easy habit of familiar thought’— such is the enormous task of this 
conversation and the work of the scholars and artists coming together here.  
We’re asking, what’s feminist about this visualization?  Drucker charges us 
with understanding that ‘display itself is conceived to embody qualitative 
expressions, and that the information is graphically constituted’ (Drucker, 
Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production, Harvard, 2014). 

This gets at the deepest crisis of our time and moment!  How many levels of 
‘undo’ are there… infinitely or indefinately— and this is the horror from which 
we recoil— when like little children touching a burning piece of hot asphalt 
with our toes and screaming with fascination and the sharp allure of pain— is 
there ANY ethical position possible if we realize each level of blindness is 
acceded to another level?  The horror, the horror, as Joseph Conrad foretold. 

Drucker goes on, nevertheless: "Our "of course" we know statements are almost 
all framed within the terms of our social world, an acknowledgement of the 
instrumental and operationalized terms on which structuring occurs. We turn 
nature into a fantastic term, "otherness" into a political category through 
which to guide apparently ethical actions, but we have few ways to undo the 
ways that knowing has already been produced to create knowledge according to 
terms programmed in advance. My argument does not resolve into a set of 
discursive metaphors in which geographies of "beyondness" or "limits" can be 
invoked. The unfamiliar is in the normative, the immediate, and the habitual, 
not what lies "outside" these realms. What is most "known" is what is most 
"unknown" because we do not think about the ways in which we know. Hard to see 
ontological blindness.”

In the heady days of cybernetics in the post-war, post-Bauhaus, Gyorgy Kepes 
promoted the notion that visual literacy could rest on the empirical objectives 
of identifying patterning in ‘nature’ — a necessity of all taxonomies in the 
natural sciences, surely.— but Kepes and others hoped for such within an 
understanding of the ‘nature of culture’.  As evidently this cannot be, not now 
at least, we have to ask how to ‘capta-mine’  , to mine what we can see in the 
dark, even as we know our own blindness exceeds what we can see .  

"The challenge for visualization is to simultaneously intensify the 
representationalism of its methods--call them to attention in a graphical, 
critical, way while undoing the belief system that representationalism 
supports--that a world can be known in some stable way.” — Drucker’s challenge 
causes me to ask what element in this semiosis is ‘stable’.  I think, perhaps 
that she is onto something when she asks, in another post about enunciation and 
voicing.  



Christina















Christina McPhee

http://christinamcphee.net





Christina McPhee
naxsm...@mac.com <mailto:naxsm...@mac.com>

http://christinamcphee.net <http://christinamcphee.net/>






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Re: [-empyre-] visualization between art and anthropology

[Christina McPhee]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Fiamma, thanks! In your work in Tijuana, you undertook to visualize some 
structural power differentials -- right? -- in the aftermath of artist-cultural 
interventions and programming by the project group InSite? In the mid-oughts ?  
Did you assert anthropological analytics to visualize the 
curator-artist-community triad? How did you use a feminist methodology - or 
maybe feminist sensibility in this visualization as it took a swerve away from 
your previous anthropological practice -- ? 

Sent from my iPhone

> On Jul 9, 2016, at 2:19 AM, fiamma montezemolo  
> wrote:
> 
> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> 
> 
> Many thanks for your discussion last week, I have been following it with some 
> delays but with great interest. 
> 
> 
> 
> I will try to jump into the conversation, starting mainly from my fieldwork 
> which - as Christina mentioned - has consistently been located between art 
> and anthropology. I've been dwelling in this milieu for the last 20 years. 
> More recently, inspired by Susan Hiller in particular, I've moved away from 
> academic anthropology which was based on my long term fieldwork in Mexico (at 
> the border between TIjuana and San Diego, where I resided for 6 years).  As a 
> result, I have attempted to translate my work into an artistic practice with 
> the aim of bypassing the questionable divide between theory and practice, 
> between the conceptual and sensorial. In my research-based art, I began to 
> create inter-media, inter-disciplinary and cross-genre interventions being 
> particularly interested in those practices that reflect on the border as a 
> mobile category of experience, of sensible AND conceptual mediations, 
> disciplinary negotiations, and geopolitical articulations. My very first 
> video work has been in Chiapas with the Zapatistas during the '90s: 
> 
> 
> 
> http://www.fiammamontezemolo.com/#faceless 
> 
> 
> 
> My focus at the time was on gender and ethnicity from a 'post-feminist' 
> perspective (Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Renato Rosaldo, etc.). Since 
> then, of course, I moved on to other topics and themes because an 
> 'identity-politics based' orientation became 'majoritarian', so to speak, 
> borrowing from Deleuze and Guattari.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> At the moment, my major preoccupation is to visualize my research-based art 
> practice through various media forms:
> 
> 
> 
> 1) fieldwork intimacy through apps: 
> 
> 
> 
> http://www.fiammamontezemolo.com/#fieldwork-notes
> 
> 
> 
> 2) Ecological problematics, primarily via installation work: 
> 
> 
> 
> http://www.fiammamontezemolo.com/#the-3-ecologies
> 
> 
> 
> 3) border issues, primarily via the video-essay form: 
> 
> 
> 
> http://www.fiammamontezemolo.com/#traces (password: fiamma)
> 
> 
> 
> Looking forward to having more stimulating conversations,
> 
> Fiamma
> -- 
> Fiamma Montezemolo
> www.FiammaMontezemolo.com
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Re: [-empyre-] : Across borders and networks: migrants, asylum seekers, or refugee?

[Christina McPhee]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Re: wanting to be thinking on these topologies, freedom *and* survival, 
repression *and* production,

I did, again last summer, during the first wave of the Syrian refugees, and 
came upon a figure like this: 

“Asylum”   http://www.christinamcphee.net/asylum/

2015  oil, graphite, paper collage and ink on muslin 165.7 x 99 x 6.3 cm 

She is leaving, freedom from, freedom to, and her dress is caught in the 
maelstrom.  Or/and this is not a silhouette,  is this a navigation?

-cm


Ian wrote,

> On Feb 16, 2016, at 9:27 AM, Ian Paul  wrote:
> 
> I think the challenge in many ways for us is in understanding borders and 
> migrations (and their networks) in their historical specificity, while also 
> understanding how those specificities are (re)produced in much more expansive 
> processes that both exceed and precede them. And so, how can we think of 
> borders and migrations as being both cause and effect? Both agent and object? 
> Things that both separate and tie together? We should be able to think of 
> borders as being both productive and repressive, enabling certain forms of 
> life while seeking to eradicate others. We should be able to think of 
> migrations as being an expression of freedom and perhaps even poetry, while 
> also being able to think of them as also at times being driven by necessity 
> and survival. I want to be thinking on these topologies: freedom *and* 
> survival, repression *and* production.

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Re: [-empyre-] detention vs movement violence (kinopolitics and Femicide)

[Christina McPhee]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Yes, yes, Ricardo!  The Transborder Immigrant Tool has been a huge inspiration 
to me— by indirect modes through the network and personally in conversation 
with your colleague and mutual friend Brett Stalbaum.

With the double negative line of thought (anti-anti-utopianism) in mind, our 
works could slipstream through- elude and elide through what appear to be ’the 
new normal’ or  ‘ordinary’ times— ‘ . A gorgeous example of poetry (AS)
literally tool for survival : 



Climb or walk in the morning. Rest midday beneath creosote
bush or mesquite, insulating yourself from the superheated 
ground. Remember-even the sidewinder hovercrafts, the bulk of
its body above the scalding sand as it leaves its trademark
J-shaped tracks across the desert dunes.


from The Transborder Immigrant Tool book  "The Desert Survival Series/ La Serie 
De Sobrevivencia Del Desierto.” 

http://jacket2.org/commentary/water-poetry-and-transborder-immigrant-tool 
<http://jacket2.org/commentary/water-poetry-and-transborder-immigrant-tool>




> On Feb 12, 2016, at 2:16 PM, Ricardo Dominguez <rrdoming...@ucsd.edu> wrote:
> 
> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Hola Tod@s y Christina,
> 
> The question of aesthetics routing around the either/or, and/both, and 
> perhaps a neither/nor sensibilities, are extremely important in
> thinking otherwise-of allowing an anti-anti-utopianism to have breath and 
> voice-in the uncanny valley of borders across the arcs of the world. Borders 
> have become sites of geo-trauma sties that continue to echo deeply in the 
> somatic architecture of bodies at the deepest levels over the last few 
> centuries, from slave-economies to the Irish to Jews to braceros-it is seems 
> to be a past-forward culture of the most negative kind. And the question of 
> foregrounding the way that a critical aesthetics, of a 
> non-relational-relationality that is not us or them, can give us an 
> alter-affects is for me extremely important and the art gesture you have 
> linked us to Christina has to be done. (And our own gestures as Electronic 
> Disturbance Theater/b.a.n.g lab have attempted to connect to these practices 
> directly and indirectly: The Transborder Immigrant Tool/La herramienta 
> transfronteriza para inmigrantes: http://ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=744 
> <http://ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=744> ). 
> 
> Abrazos, Ricardo 
> 
> On 2/11/16 4:50 PM, Christina McPhee wrote:
>> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
>> Speaking of movement violence and femicide strongly brings to mind the 
>> artist and writer Etel Adnan’s sublime novel (1973), “Sitt Marie Rose.” Set 
>> during the Lebanese Civil War and based on a true story, Sitt Marie Rose 
>> follows the movements and ultimate execution of a person whose affiliations 
>> across enemy lines conflicts with her filiations (family, brothers, sisters, 
>> religious identification).  Marie Rose refuses to give up teaching 
>> Palestinian children in a refugee camp
>> across enemy lines from her home base in Christian Lebanon. 
>> 
>> "How can one resist without deploying the language of opposition, struggle, 
>> and enmity that forms the conceptual arsenal of war? How can one form a 
>> collective “we” of resistance without creating an opposite “them”? To what 
>> extent does literature resist the very discourse of war that distinguishes 
>> between friend and enemy camps? Beyond the mere refusal of war, Sitt Marie 
>> Rose points to ways of conceiving conflict otherwise, not as a struggle of 
>> arms but as a contest for speech. The novel gestures toward a forum where 
>> the political can emerge other than in the warring binaries of friendship 
>> and enmity—a trap it eludes, I will argue, via narrative representation, “ 
>> writes Olivia C. Harrison in an essay on the novel (Resistances of 
>> Literature: Strategies of Narrative Affiliation in Etel Adnan’s Sitt Marie 
>> Rose, Post-Colonial Text, vol 5, no. 1 2009) 
>>  
>> This is why I am continuing to bring up examples of migration-trauma 
>> literature and story telling as a thread in this discussion. Its political 
>> power is not to be underestimated. 
>> 
>> 
>> Christina
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sitt_Marie_Rose 
>> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sitt_Marie_Rose>
>> 
>> http://christinamcphee.net <http://christinamcphee.net/>
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>  
>> 
>>  
>> 
>>  
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Ricardo notes, "As I like to say to my students: "Do we fear the wal

Re: [-empyre-] detention vs movement violence (kinopolitics and Femicide)

[Christina McPhee]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Speaking of movement violence and femicide strongly brings to mind the artist 
and writer Etel Adnan’s sublime novel (1973), “Sitt Marie Rose.” Set during the 
Lebanese Civil War and based on a true story, Sitt Marie Rose follows the 
movements and ultimate execution of a person whose affiliations across enemy 
lines conflicts with her filiations (family, brothers, sisters, religious 
identification).  Marie Rose refuses to give up teaching Palestinian children 
in a refugee camp
across enemy lines from her home base in Christian Lebanon. 

"How can one resist without deploying the language of opposition, struggle, and 
enmity that forms the conceptual arsenal of war? How can one form a collective 
“we” of resistance without creating an opposite “them”? To what extent does 
literature resist the very discourse of war that distinguishes between friend 
and enemy camps? Beyond the mere refusal of war, Sitt Marie Rose points to ways 
of conceiving conflict otherwise, not as a struggle of arms but as a contest 
for speech. The novel gestures toward a forum where the political can emerge 
other than in the warring binaries of friendship and enmity—a trap it eludes, I 
will argue, via narrative representation, “ writes Olivia C. Harrison in an 
essay on the novel (Resistances of Literature: Strategies of Narrative 
Affiliation in Etel Adnan’s Sitt Marie Rose, Post-Colonial Text, vol 5, no. 1 
2009) 
 
This is why I am continuing to bring up examples of migration-trauma literature 
and story telling as a thread in this discussion. Its political power is not to 
be underestimated. 


Christina



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sitt_Marie_Rose

http://christinamcphee.net






 

 

 



Ricardo notes, "As I like to say to my students: "Do we fear the walking dead, 
because they are dead or because they are walking?" We fear those that move 
differently”. 


> On Feb 11, 2016, at 3:41 PM, Murat Nemet-Nejat  wrote:
> 
> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Ricardo,
> 
> Does kinopolitics concern itself only with human flows, what about the flow 
> of jobs across state lines where the workers stay static? Both are 
> political/economic migrations where the concept of nation states is weakened. 
> But do, or don't, these different migrations have different ethical 
> consequences? 
> 
> Ciao,
> Murat
> 
> On Thu, Feb 11, 2016 at 10:14 AM, Ricardo Dominguez  
> wrote:
> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Hola Tod@s,
> 
> The question of blocking human flows and the expanding human flows, of escape 
> routes and fencing in becomes  (a question of kinopolitics). Kinopolitics is 
> the theory and analysis of social motion: the politics of movement. Instead 
> of understanding societies as 
> static systems, we look at regimes of movement both perceptible and 
> imperceptible. Social motions that can be framed as flows, junctions,
> and circulations-floods, flux, and vector. Immigrants and refugees are 
> figures of movement, nomadic, that no-longer bound to rights and 
> representation of static states-the figure who walks and unmakes the 
> aesthetics and romance of the nation or the union. As I like to say to my 
> students: "Do we fear the walking dead, because they are dead or because they 
> are walking?" We fear those that move differently". 
> 
> This creates the constant need to stop, block, detain, or eliminate sectors 
> of these walking communities.
> 
> One of the outcomes is that containment zones like Juarez, Mexico, or spaces 
> along political Equator, or Free Trade Zones, and Pipeline cultures is the 
> segmentation of people as disposable or available for disposable. And more 
> often than not women are the first to be the targets: 
> http://www.texasobserver.org/femicide-in-juarez-is-not-a-myth/ and also worth 
> reading is the book the Femicide Machine:
> https://www.thing.net/~rdom/ucsd/Borders/TheFemicideMachine.pdf
> 
> Two text that have found helpful kinopolitics are:
> 
> Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the 21st Century:
> https://www.thing.net/~rdom/ucsd/Borders/Escape.pdf 
> 
> and The Figure of the Migrant 
> https://www.thing.net/~rdom/ucsd/Borders/TheMigrant.pdf
> 
> Abrazos,
> Ricardo
> 
> 
> 
> On 2/10/16 7:27 PM, Irina Contreras wrote:
>> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
>> 
>> 
>> Johannes,
>> 
>> I appreciate the request to think about sexual violence as it pertains to 
>> the encampments. For myself, I think of sexual and gender based violences as 
>> direct results of colonial regime. Following people like Nicole Guidotti, I 
>> think of the way she speaks of utterances as a way to discuss how scholars 
>> "gloss over" certain facts pertaining to 
>> sexualized/gendered/racialized/classed information when producing text. 
>> That's obviously done within so many kinds of work, research, activism and 
>> 

Re: [-empyre-] detention vs movement violence

[Christina McPhee]

--empyre- soft-skinned space-- The Cherokee people were forced to walk from their home in the southern 
Appalachians to the plains of Oklahoma (pre-state “Indian Territory”) in the 
1830s. Here is the question of language: what is it to speak of and to recover 
language from within the violent loss of home? Native American novelist Diane 
Glancy asks ‘would we find our words hadn’t migrated? “  The dread of this 
passage is worth quoting in full:

“MARITOLE:

I remembered following Knobowtee through the woods in North Carolina.  The 
trees laughing. The creek. Our words came out of the land.  Would our words 
leave their place? Did they walk, too? Would we have language when we got to 
Fort Gibson in Indian Territory? Would we find our words hadn’t migrated? 

If the language didn’t ross on the rail, it would sink back inside the trees 
and rocks. It would be buried in the land.  It would go back to where it came.

Let Knowbowtee catch some words.  Let him talk to me. That will be the bird he 
catches. “

What about catching words? what is this situation, of the unspeakable 
situation— that speaks ? I ‘m asking about a poetics of migration, really— what 
can this be? 

Diane Glancy  / Pushing the Bear (novel) 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pushing_the_Bear 




Christina
http://christinamcphee.net 

> On Feb 10, 2016, at 2:58 PM, Johannes Birringer 
>  wrote:
> 
> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> 
> 
> what is "kinopolitics"?
> 
> just wondering as the term (referring to kino/cinema)? was not clear to me 
> when I think Ricardo 
> first brought it up...
> unless there is a link here to what, I think, P.Sloterdijk once wrote as a 
> critique
> "political kinetics”, kinetic movement of 20th century politics of speed and 
> displacement,
> war machines, etc
> -  i think in 1989 he even spoke of a kinetic inferno, but I doubt that at 
> the time he
> could anticipate the current refugee migrations and displacements. 
> 
> thanks for your reply Isabelle, I need more time to reflect, as I think
> my question was really how the "camp" has been used as a metaphor or
> as a symbolic system by philosophers and that is not what we were
> talking about, and my confusion came from a sense of the romantic resistance
> I felt you proposed vis à vis governmental / central policy of containment 
> (which is not in fact
> quite true for Germany,  I surmise, where regional administrations and help 
> organizations
> in a distributed federal landscape need to take often their own initiatives 
> for help?); Calais
> and Grande-Synthe at Dunkerque may be dfferent in that respect, but i visited 
> facilties in the
> Saarland near a town where I grew up and managing help was done through a mix 
> of
> local institutions and mini-NGOs, and provisions for sleep, care, food were 
> not
> left to "Jungle" self administration and done cooperatively, I wonder 
> actually what
> forms of governance or camp community formation happen under the 
> circumstances,
> and how different the anticipations or hopes may be (and Ana, your case back 
> then surely
> sounds as if you had been very fortunate). 
> 
> I wonder whether there would be room here to also look at some of the 
> incidents of
> sexual violence, puportedly committed by immigrant asylum seekers staying in 
> Germany
> at the time of the criminal offenses (Cologne e.g.), and how such violence 
> has been used
> now against migrants by the instrumentalizing political wings and press. 
> 
> 
> regards
> Johannes Birringer
> dap-lab
> 
> ___
> empyre forum
> empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu

___
empyre forum
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http://empyre.library.cornell.edu

Re: [-empyre-] Introducing Christina McPhee

[Christina McPhee]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Thank you, Renate. I think this is the first time I’ve ever been a ‘guest’ 
(after a lot of time as a moderator). 

Maybe in the spirit of the ‘ignorant schoolmaster’ thought i am far from being 
anyone’s teacher, I’d like to help us think about ‘migration’ and 
‘displacement’ in different registers.

I was born to ‘migration” in a two-fold sense— one, that my family left a world 
of cousins and aunts, friends, sun, city, mountains and ocean for a  stark 
place on the great plains when I was seven;  two, a result of one,  I grew up 
with a basic self understanding as one who lived in a kind of exile and a 
longing for return— and the perennial dilemma that no return is possible, only 
the narrative around returns.  I became fascinated with stories of immigrants 
and displaced people, I devoured young adult novels about early 19th century 
tenement life on the Lower East Side (“Hester Street”) … I stumbled upon the 
“Diary of Ann Frank” and so discovered through those pages the actual fact of 
the Holocaust about which I had been totally ignorant until the age of nine… My 
father was an historian of European immigration on the Great Plains— and our 
family talk at night was cycling, at dinner around a round table, through 
themes of displacement and resilience, of territorial war and xenophobias, of 
genocide and loss. Outside by day, an apparent emptiness of sky and prairie 
seemed marked by  invisible runes, as if the land itself denoted a secret 
language, you could catch a glimpse if you watched carefully—. Born to and born 
from migration,  I have sought knowledge and wisdom in  works of so many 
artists dealing with exile, displacement, alienation and tenacity.  Some of 
these artists include, to mention but a few— 


Chantal Ackerman  / News From Home  
https://www.criterion.com/films/20978-news-from-home
Multiplicity (Stephano Boeri et al) / Solid Sea   (installation) 
http://stefanoboeri.net/?p=2432
Rebecca Prichard / Dream Pill  (theatre) 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kLutSeF0ZE
Diane Glancy  / Pushing the Bear (novel) 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pushing_the_Bear



Here  is the question of language: what is it to speak of and to recover 
language from within the violent loss of home? 

 In Pushing the Bear, Diane Glancy’s almost-readers theatre- like dramatization 
of the Trail of Tears, wherein the Cherokee people were forced to walk from 
their home in the southern Appalachians to the plains of Oklahoma (then not a 
state, but “Indian Territory”) in the 1830s— the main protagonist, Maritole, 
asks ‘would we find our words hadn’t migrated? “  The dread of this passage is 
worth quoting in full:

“MARITOLE:

I remembered following Knobowtee through the woods in North Carolina.  The 
trees laughing. The creek. Our words came out of the land.  Would our words 
leave their place? Did they walk, too? Would we have language when we got to 
Fort Gibson in Indian Territory? Would we find our words hadn’t migrated? 

If the language didn’t ross on the rail, it would sink back inside the trees 
and rocks. It would be buried in the land.  It would go back to where it came.

Let Knowbowtee catch some words.  Let him talk to me. That will be the bird he 
catches. “



What about catching words? what is this situation, of the unspeakable 
situation— that speaks ? I ‘m asking about a poetics of migration, really— what 
can this be? 



all my best

Christina





http://christinamcphee.net







> On Feb 8, 2016, at 8:31 PM, Renate Terese Ferro  wrote:
> 
> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Dear all, 
> I have been enjoying the robust discussion thus far.  So happy that so many 
> of you are sharing your experiences and expertise.  Joining us over the next 
> week will be our long time friend Christina MsPhee. Welcome back Christina.  
> Below is her biography.  An invitation to all of guests to stay on as long as 
> their schedules permit. Many thanks to all of you.  
> 
> Christina McPhee’s images move from within a matrix of abstraction, shadowing 
> figures and contingent
> effects. Her work emulates potential forms of life, in various systems and
> territories, and in real and imagined ecologies. Her dynamic, performative,
> physical engagement with materials is a seduction into surface-skidding
> calligraphic gestures and mark-making. The tactics of living are in 
> subterfuge,
> like the ‘dazzle ships’ of camouflage in war. Jagged shards vie for position
> and collide with animations, which together swarm, fold, cascade and crash in
> compositions that suggest accelerating mass movements, or the search for
> grounding and commons.  Her work takes on violence, tragic-comic
> exuberance, and vitality from within a ‘post-natural’ experience of community.
> 
> Christina McPhee’s work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of 
> American Art, New Museum of Contemporary
> Art-Rhizome 

[-empyre-] Christina McPhee news and happy new year

[Christina McPhee]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--With happy memories of -empyre- as a moderator from 2002 to 2008, in the 
network these days with video, photomontage, drawing and painting— 

Next February and March, Leafa Janice Kraus, an -empyre- friend of many years 
past, is showing films from “Carbon Song Cycle’, including ‘Solar Circuit Parts 
Per Million” (2013), with music by Pamela Z, at her new space, OLGA, in 
Hamilton, Aotearoa New Zealand.   
http://www.christinamcphee.net/solar-circuit-parts-per-million/ 
<http://www.christinamcphee.net/solar-circuit-parts-per-million/>

Carbon Song Cycle, as a live performance work, with multichannel expanded video 
by Christina McPhee and Pamela Z, premiered at Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific 
Film Archive in California and Roulette in New York in 
2013...http://www.christinamcphee.net/carbon-song-cycle-bampfa/ 
<http://www.christinamcphee.net/carbon-song-cycle-bampfa/>


Here’s a link to recent videos under the title “Neuro-Tectonic Video Drawings” 
http://www.christinamcphee.net/christina-mcphee-time-based-work-introduction/ 
<http://www.christinamcphee.net/christina-mcphee-time-based-work-introduction/>

Christina McPhee’s live and recorded drawings animate dense montage within 
images of fragile marine ecologies and seismic landscapes. “McPhee’s drawing, 
extended to and infiltrated with digital video, seems to outline a different 
and stranger project: that of creating as yet unknown material composites by 
aligning the rapid time-processing of our nervous systems with the emergent 
natures at actual sites of energy production or extraction” (Ina Blom).  
Strategic linking of live and performed drawing with documentary video affords 
new spaces to explore vital futures.  ”In the context that McPhee provides, 
every line—charcoal, musical notes, cell phone light—embodies the expenditure 
of resources and energy necessary for the forms of capture and condensation 
that representation requires. As though metaphor were to be measured in 
kilojoules…” (Frazer Ward)


In drawing and painting, my latest works are here

http://www.christinamcphee.net/category/projects/2016/ 
<http://www.christinamcphee.net/category/projects/2016/>
http://www.christinamcphee.net/category/projects/2015/ 
<http://www.christinamcphee.net/category/projects/2015/>

generally speaking—

Christina McPhee’s images move from within a matrix of abstraction, shadowing 
figures and contingent effects. Her work emulates potential forms of life, in 
various systems and territories, and in real and imagined ecologies. Her 
dynamic, performative, physical engagement with materials is a seduction into 
surface-skidding calligraphic gestures and mark-making. The tactics of living 
are in subterfuge, like the ‘dazzle ships’ of camouflage in war. Jagged shards 
vie for position and collide with animations, which together swarm, fold, 
cascade and crash in compositions that suggest accelerating mass movements, or 
the search for grounding and commons.  Her work takes on violence, tragic-comic 
exuberance, and vitality from within a ‘post-natural’ experience of community.


All my best and happy 2016 to all— 

Christina


http://christinamcphee.net <http://christinamcphee.net/>  ___
empyre forum
empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
http://empyre.library.cornell.edu