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Welcome to July, 2018 on on –empyre- soft-skinned space:
Bodies and Voices: an exploration of how multiplicities of body and voice produce narrative in video and media art / an exploration of how multiplicities of body and voice produce narrative on the empyre listserve Organized by Daniel Lichtman. ‘Moderated’ by Helena Haimes, Daniel Lichtman, Robert Rapoport, Lee Tusman, Xin Xin (biographies below). Artists will include: Johann Arens, Asta Groting, Maia Conran, Hans Diernberger, Jessica Tsang, Beth Collar, Kerry Downy, William Santen, Matt Freedman, Benjamin Orlow, Ciaran O Dochartaigh, Eoghan Ryan, Laura Morrison, and more TBA. (biographies will be included with the artists’ links). All empyre subscribers are invited to participate! Please contribute as moderators, artists or both! (see below for details) Welcome to the July ‘discussion’. For this month I am planning to shake up the format of weekly guest-led conversation. I have been thinking about how the listserve functions in relation to the idea of narration and the idea of multiple voices and bodies. On the one hand, empyre is a network of many people who contribute to an open-ended conversation, and on the other, it’s also an archival knowledge-base about media and art. I have long been interested in the use of multiplicities of body and voice in art, and how it brings up questions of narration such as: what makes up a narrator, how does narration work, and how does it link (or hold apart) bodies and voices form each other? So for this project I am considering the multiple and distributed forms of voice on empyre itself as a starting point for the month’s program. I have asked a number of artists to provide the list with a video link (or documentation of a project) that, very broadly, generates narrative through the use of multiple, overlapping bodies and voices. Several times each week I will post such a link to empyre. 5 or so invited moderators will write a number of fragmentary responses that investigate how how each submitted work relates to the theme. These responses will be succinct thoughts in bullet-point form, somewhat like the kind of thoughts that might be shared during a studio visit or art-school seminar. I have invited the moderators in part because of their diverse approaches to these questions. Also, importantly!: I invite members of the empyre community to participate, both as artists and as moderators! Please feel free to post links to any of your own artworks that relate to the theme, and please feel free to respond with your own bullet-point thoughts and reflections. The more the better! (Please reach out to me directly if you need help sharing a video online) Using this experimental format, the project aims to create a new relation between the language used on the list, the artworks cited in conversation, the list’s archive, and the list participants. Hopefully discussion about voices, bodies and narrative in relation to the artworks will feedback into thinking about how the list itself functions. TO MAKE A POST TO THE SUBSCRIPTION LIST USE: <empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au> TO ACCESS ARCHIVES USE THIS URL: http://lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/ TO ACCESS THE WEBSITE FROM THE CORNELL SERVER TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT EMPYRE GO TO: http://empyre.library.cornell.edu Biographies of the ‘moderators’: Helena Haimes Helena Haimes is a London-based writer and curator. Her writing focuses on the impact of gentrification and technology on creative practices, and she has contributed essays and reviews to artist-led publications in Europe and the US including: Temporary Art Review; Garageland Magazine; Objectiv Journal; MAP Magazine and Doggerland Journal. In 2016, she co-ran the NYC project space The Third Policeman with artist Sinead Breslin. Helena has participated as a guest jury member for graduate work at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, and selected the shortlist for the Stuart Croft Foundation's Curatorial and Special Projects Award in 2017. Robert Rapoport Robert Rapoport’s practice looks at the relationship between moving image editing and socialization. His dissertation at the University of Oxford focused larger cultural shifts brought on by computer vision. He is currently a visiting lecture in Digital Media at the University of Lüneburg, Germany. He has taught both theory and practice of cinema in a number of contexts. More information at www.iterativeframe.com Lee Tusman Lee Tusman is an artist, coder, and curator interested in the application of the radical ethos of collectives and DIY culture to the creation of, aesthetics, and open-source distribution methods of digital culture. He creates interactive media, artwork, software, bots, websites, virtual assistants, games, sound and radio stations alone and in collaboration. Areas of research and work include: decentralized networks, infrastructure for online collaborative artmaking, generative processes, sonification of data, alternative interfaces and performance tools, bots and digital assistants. Tusman has presented exhibitions and projects at universities, galleries, institutions, and alternative spaces including The Barnes Foundation; The Hammer Museum; Riverside Art Museum; Babycastles; California State University, Northridge; University of California, Riverside; Pew Center For Arts and Heritage - New Spaces/New Formats; Space 1026; Little Berlin; Hidden City; and many others, and has been interviewed by The New York Times, Al Jazeera, NPR, LA Times, NBC, Metro, CBS, Technically, AQNB, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Wire, and The Smithsonian. He studied at Brandeis University and received his MFA at UCLA in Design Media Arts. He is a mentor for the Processing Foundation. Xin Xin Xin Xin is an artist and journalist questioning the relationship between agency and technology through video, web, and community projects. Xin co-founded The School of Otherness which seeks to empower marginalized identities through storytelling, forums, and workshops that process experiences of the other. They initiated voidLab, an intersectional feminist collective exploring art, technology, and society. Their work has been exhibited at Ars Electronica, the Hammer Museum, Gene Siskel Film Center, and Machine Project. Xin holds a M.F.A from UCLA Design Media Arts. They have given numerous talks at universities, and currently teach web and video at UCLA and Loyola Marymount University.
_______________________________________________ empyre forum empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
