Re: [-empyre-] (no subject)

[Derek Curry]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hello all,

These are all good points!

For me, it also raises the question of who the audience needs to be for
tabletop games.  Now that it is possible to publish games with limited runs
and to be both funded and advertised through crowdsourcing platforms before
the game is physically produced, I imagine there are possibilities to
create games for very small and specific audiences.  I’ve thought about
this before with some of the tabletop games I’ve made using GameCrafter.
Some of these games were used for psychology experiments (creating a game
to teach children delay of gratification), or to explain complex financial
instruments—both of which necessitated limited printings.  It occurred to
me that it would be possible to create one-of-a-kind tabletop games—perhaps
using images that have a personal meaning to the intended players.  This
example does not conform well to a traditional tabletop publishing model,
but could fit a fine art paradigm where galleries sell unique objects to
collectors who are willing to pay higher prices specifically *because* the
objects are unique.  Which may not be that much of a stretch—as Brent
pointed out, collecting is as much of a goal as playing games now for some
people.  Or, just as artists are often commissioned to create a portrait of
an individual or artwork for a specific context, game designers could
create tabletop games commissioned by a specific individuals or group.
Some tabletop indie games are already produced in more limited runs than
prints or photographs sold on the art market.  I am by no means suggesting
that this model should replace the current market for tabletop games, but
rather that it could exist alongside it and allow for new types of
experimentation in tabletop games.  Many of the most experimental
avant-garde artists were funded primarily by one or a few patrons, and I am
wondering if this is a possibility for tabletop game designers.

On Wed, Mar 11, 2020 at 7:14 PM Aaron Trammell 
wrote:

> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Yes to this!
>
> I want to link your points here on sustainability to the conversations on
> the list last week. You're right! Modern board games are only being built
> for a crowdfunded splash and 1-2 actual plays at the moment. But the
> marketing is driven by a consumer lust for virtual or potential plays. What
> this means, though is more plastics, more trash, and more waste.
>
> The crowdfunding revolution is big news, but it's full of upsides and
> downsides. I do think that the present moment of modern board games is
> perhaps more exciting for collectors than it is for players. But at the
> same time, space is being made for new and (sometimes) diverse voices in
> the space of design. I dunno. Should we be concerned about the waste modern
> board games are producing now while the industry is still relatively small?
>
> On Tue, Mar 10, 2020 at 1:15 PM Brent Povis 
> wrote:
>
>> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
>> Thanks Alenda and fine folks of Empyre! It was fun following last week’s
>> lines, which ran somewhat adjacent but were certainly relevant to board
>> gaming as well. As a tabletop designer/publisher, hopefully I can dip into
>> some industry perspective for this week’s Entmoot.
>>
>>
>>
>> The first title from our publishing house, a tactical 2-player game
>> called Morels  (2012), hit
>> kitchen tables 17 years after Settlers of Catan
>>  (1995) made the leap from
>> Germany to revolutionize American board gaming. We entered the market when
>> the creeping exponential upsweep of game releases over time
>>  was just beginning
>> to reach skyward. That acceleration has continued in earnest, such that
>> more tabletop games have been released in the 21st century than in all
>> of preceding human history.
>>
>>
>> Reasons for this are many and varied, from a crowdfunding-enabled
>> publishing coup and corresponding entry of new and dedicated talent to the
>> designer pool on the production side, to a growing interest in augmenting
>> face-to-face time among family and friends on the consumer side. An
>> additional catalyst, born at the intersection of these factors and the one
>> I’d like to examine in this post in hopes of making the analog jump on the
>> “Green Gaming” discussions of last week, is the “cult of the new” that has
>> increasingly defined the board game hobby over the last 5-10 years.
>>
>>
>>
>> When I was a child in the mid 80’s, the shelves in a sunlit corner of my
>> bedroom glittered with about 60 board games, a trove that bred awe among
>> schoolmates and that ever-elusive “quality time” for our family, which I’m
>> thankful to say happened on a near-nightly basis. I’d say 40 of those
>> titles were seldom played, primarily due to 

Re: [-empyre-] (no subject)

[Aaron Trammell]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Yes to this!

I want to link your points here on sustainability to the conversations on
the list last week. You're right! Modern board games are only being built
for a crowdfunded splash and 1-2 actual plays at the moment. But the
marketing is driven by a consumer lust for virtual or potential plays. What
this means, though is more plastics, more trash, and more waste.

The crowdfunding revolution is big news, but it's full of upsides and
downsides. I do think that the present moment of modern board games is
perhaps more exciting for collectors than it is for players. But at the
same time, space is being made for new and (sometimes) diverse voices in
the space of design. I dunno. Should we be concerned about the waste modern
board games are producing now while the industry is still relatively small?

On Tue, Mar 10, 2020 at 1:15 PM Brent Povis 
wrote:

> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Thanks Alenda and fine folks of Empyre! It was fun following last week’s
> lines, which ran somewhat adjacent but were certainly relevant to board
> gaming as well. As a tabletop designer/publisher, hopefully I can dip into
> some industry perspective for this week’s Entmoot.
>
>
>
> The first title from our publishing house, a tactical 2-player game called
> Morels  (2012), hit
> kitchen tables 17 years after Settlers of Catan
>  (1995) made the leap from
> Germany to revolutionize American board gaming. We entered the market when
> the creeping exponential upsweep of game releases over time
>  was just beginning
> to reach skyward. That acceleration has continued in earnest, such that
> more tabletop games have been released in the 21st century than in all of
> preceding human history.
>
>
> Reasons for this are many and varied, from a crowdfunding-enabled
> publishing coup and corresponding entry of new and dedicated talent to the
> designer pool on the production side, to a growing interest in augmenting
> face-to-face time among family and friends on the consumer side. An
> additional catalyst, born at the intersection of these factors and the one
> I’d like to examine in this post in hopes of making the analog jump on the
> “Green Gaming” discussions of last week, is the “cult of the new” that has
> increasingly defined the board game hobby over the last 5-10 years.
>
>
>
> When I was a child in the mid 80’s, the shelves in a sunlit corner of my
> bedroom glittered with about 60 board games, a trove that bred awe among
> schoolmates and that ever-elusive “quality time” for our family, which I’m
> thankful to say happened on a near-nightly basis. I’d say 40 of those
> titles were seldom played, primarily due to a lack of substance, while the
> other 20 saw action ad infinitum. Perhaps this is why, when designing, the
> guiding principle at the core of my efforts is to build a system that will
> be as good (or better) on the 50th play as it was on the 5th. It’s a
> difficult bar to clear, but a useful metric that helps to create and
> identify tabletop games with staying power.
>
>
> Last year, I was discussing this approach with a friend and board game
> shop owner. He expressed some surprise and basically asked why, when most
> board games were now only being played 2-5 times before they were relegated
> in the face of new acquisitions. This struck me. It’s not to say that
> games aren’t being produced with replayability in mind, it’s more the
> notion that for a successful publishing house in today’s climate, they
> don’t need to be. For the consumer, the goal for many has shifted to
> collecting as much as to playing, with plays per title decreasing while
> rate of acquisition reshapes home libraries to Alexandrian proportions that
> make my childhood collection of 60 look pedestrian.
>
>
>
> What to make of this shift as seen through the environmental lens? Many
> business models now have publishers selling 50-75% of a new release’s first
> printing, often the only printing, on the initial crowdfunded splash. The
> goal, then, is a 6- or 7-figure Kickstarter campaign rather than sustained
> retail sales. Design, art, development, manufacturing, marketing, and
> shipping are compactly wrapped in a cycle that is bending towards fewer and
> fewer months, with profitability optimized by number of new releases (this
> approach does not necessarily preclude quality, and many games from even
> the most prolific houses are excellent, but they are the subject of furious
> tides). On one hand, there is efficiency gained with direct
> publisher-customer shipping and manufacturing targeting total sales in one
> assertive swoop. On the other, the overwhelming volume of releases results
> in 25%-50% of copies for games that fail to gain traction beyond the
> initial splash stockpiling in 

Re: [-empyre-] (no subject)

[Dale Hudson]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Thanks, Beth. 

These insights from your research are fascinating. 

I’m looking forward to reading more when the research is published, especially 
about the use of online platforms to produce a community for discussions that 
might not translate, especially into western commercial art world where those 
adjectives are linked to the entire catalogue of orientalist tropes and 
rationales for military interventions. 

We’ll return to the related category of feminist arts practice in week 3, so we 
can considered the power asymmetries between colonial feminism, corporate 
feminism, white feminism in contrast with postcolonial feminisms, transnational 
feminisms, Muslim feminisms, and so forth.

Dale

> On Feb 7, 2020, at 23:17, Derderian, Elizabeth  
> wrote:
> 
> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Hello all
> In response to one of Dale's earlier Qs: the artists I have worked with in 
> the UAE have used the internet to make work about exile/belonging/citizenship 
> (or lack thereof), compulsions across boundaries or taboos (physical, 
> emotional, social, etc), hymen rejuvenation schemes that prey on Khaleeji 
> women, to name a few. I think the first two artists, their work is relatable 
> quite broadly. The third artist, her work was meant to spark a conversation 
> amongst local women, which it did; it speaks to global feminist art practices 
> secondarily. Most artists I worked with felt some kind of obligation to speak 
> to a local community they identified with (whether city, nation, ethnicity, 
> religion or region), but struggled to do so in ways that didn't feel a) trite 
> or b) silo them as a [qualifying adjective]* artist - they reported often 
> trying to speak broadly about the human condition from their particular 
> vantage, and being frustrated as writers in the media defined their 
> contributions as valuable solely because of their positionality. 
> 
> *ie Arab, female Muslim, Emirati, etc. See also: Olu Oguibe, The Culture Game 
> (2004) 
> 
> -Beth 
> ___
> empyre forum
> empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au 
> https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__empyre.library.cornell.edu=DwICAg=slrrB7dE8n7gBJbeO0g-IQ=qcTmJUObF8XYm8yI7VhbJrDrNIg8UQyscq1gBMIIbxk=lQXF90rYvQ0cuXc636pdf33DoxzjTjxt5Vk2KFBtkO8=2IuRNES0H47Sre5Gfp8FN9naGH0JDB8U0vL_pBiS0ig=
>  
> 
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Re: [-empyre-] (no subject)

[Stirling Newberry]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--You have some very interesting ideas,  which by différance cannot never
actually be ascertained with finality.  Let me then add a couple of minor
points:

1. Levinas is quite rightly is just did in the statuses of something called
art,  and in a sense, he,  in a Gödelian way,  is the opposite side of
Foucault.  He is interested in shadows where Foucault is interested in
light,  but they each gravitate towards the opposite nature.

2. 花樣年華 is indeed a signature work which explains the vertical
transcendence that Levinas is getting,  and I would be very much interested
in your book project.  In 2005 I wrote back a string quartet on the
difference and différance of love in the context of the final movie, and
the covered and overt movies which could have been made with other
selections which were filmed.  The man, Chow Mo-wan, thinks of love as an
act,  while the woman, Su Li-zhen, carries a child,  which I would submit
is an act in being.  The string quartet is and is not named for the film.

On Sun, Nov 11, 2018 at 4:23 PM Elizabeth Wijaya  wrote:

> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Stirling Newberry: "The space also has differing viewpoints, as does every
> individual viewer. Art in situ is, too some extent, illusory."
>
> In his essay, "Reality and its Shadow, " Levinas is suspicious of art as
> monstrously inhuman because it is trapped in the stasis of a "Meanwhile"
> that does not come to pass. He says that "art is the falling movement on
> the hither side of time, into fate." In his reading, the haunted
> temporality of the image—that is neither in the moment, nor has any
> future—is trapped in stasis. Levinas lists non-plastic arts, "music,
> literature, theater and cinema," that too do not escape the shadow of the
> meanwhile. For Levinas, the meanwhile is an "eternal duration of the
> interval" and it is Art that brings about just this duration in the
> interval, where the shadow of reality is immobilized.
>
> In my rereading of the meanwhile in Levinas's through its shadow, I
>  propose that the relation between art and art in remediation as the
> meeting of shadows and shadows.  If the shadow is reality's parallel
> possibility where reality's nonexistence is discovered, Levinas's work
> could be read as a philosophy of the shadow that haunts the visible.
>
> In a chapter of my book project, I read the rhythm in Levinas's oeuvre
> between belief in vertical transcendence and the turns to darkness
> alongside the acts of substitution that link the intervals of reality and
> the shadow of art through the late 1990s textures of the Bangkok alley in
> In the Mood for Love  and the remediation of *In the Mood for Love*, by
> Singapore artist Ming Wong in an installation 'In Love for the Mood."
> ___
> 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-] (no subject)

[Murat Nemet-Nejat]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--In my most recent poem *Animals of Dawn *(Talisman, 2016) I deal with the
same idea of stasis (its relation to infinity) in terms of Hamlet's delay
in taking revenge --that he does that because he exists in an another
temporal dimension than everyday life. The following passage from Levinas
is a caption to one of the pieces ("fragments") in the book,: ""The idea of
infinity is then not the only one that teaches what we are ignorant of
It is not a reminiscence. It is experience in the sole radical sense of the
term... without this exteriority being able to be integrate."[i]

--

[i]Experience eliminates memory and becomes the language of the soul (of
*is*). In the soul, motion exists as idea, as thought tissue in motion. In
this language the non-integrate exterior (the idea of infinity) and the
ineffable interior (the eroding dream) become visible, as joined, for the
duration of an instant (as nutrinos), in the soul's motions towards
forgetting, and dying.


Ciao,

Murat



On Sun, Nov 11, 2018 at 4:22 PM Elizabeth Wijaya  wrote:

> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Stirling Newberry: "The space also has differing viewpoints, as does every
> individual viewer. Art in situ is, too some extent, illusory."
>
> In his essay, "Reality and its Shadow, " Levinas is suspicious of art as
> monstrously inhuman because it is trapped in the stasis of a "Meanwhile"
> that does not come to pass. He says that "art is the falling movement on
> the hither side of time, into fate." In his reading, the haunted
> temporality of the image—that is neither in the moment, nor has any
> future—is trapped in stasis. Levinas lists non-plastic arts, "music,
> literature, theater and cinema," that too do not escape the shadow of the
> meanwhile. For Levinas, the meanwhile is an "eternal duration of the
> interval" and it is Art that brings about just this duration in the
> interval, where the shadow of reality is immobilized.
>
> In my rereading of the meanwhile in Levinas's through its shadow, I
>  propose that the relation between art and art in remediation as the
> meeting of shadows and shadows.  If the shadow is reality's parallel
> possibility where reality's nonexistence is discovered, Levinas's work
> could be read as a philosophy of the shadow that haunts the visible.
>
> In a chapter of my book project, I read the rhythm in Levinas's oeuvre
> between belief in vertical transcendence and the turns to darkness
> alongside the acts of substitution that link the intervals of reality and
> the shadow of art through the late 1990s textures of the Bangkok alley in
> In the Mood for Love  and the remediation of *In the Mood for Love*, by
> Singapore artist Ming Wong in an installation 'In Love for the Mood."
> ___
> 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-] (no subject)

[Tyler Fox]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Dear Norie,

Thanks for the great connections to both the Algae Opera and your own
microbiotic grumblings.

I have read about the Algae Opera, and would really love to see it live. I
think reframing our own autonomic processes of breathing and digesting as
collaborative endeavors is a powerful move (production of our oxygen is
obviously reliant on other actors, and so too is our digestion). I don't
think I've successfully been able to do this in my work yet, but it is
always on my mind.

Tyler



On Fri, Oct 13, 2017 at 6:41 PM, Norie Neumark  wrote:

> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
>
> Hello Tyler and everyone
>
> What a great post, Tyler, and wonderful to hear about your work. Perhaps
> you know about the algae opera by Michael Burton and Michiko Nitta?  (
> http://www.burtonnitta.co.uk/algaeopera.html). I haven’t seen it myself
> but read about it and accessed it online and was enchanted. Again,
> apologies for being lazy (if this is really bad net etiquette, let me
> know!) as I just put in an excerpt about the work from my *Voicetracks*
> book:
>
>   Breath also connects us to the place through which it resonates and the 
> others
> in that place and in the shared medium of air. It not only connects people,
> intersubjectively, it also connects people to animals and things,  voicing
> the connections between breath and the natural environment. I listen to
> this in *The Algae Opera* of artists BurtonNitta (Michael Burton and Michiko
> Nitta), for example, which literally breathes life into the natural 
> environment,
> giving voice to the relationship between human breath and plant life on
> our planet. In this work, it is an opera singer’s copious voiced breath
> that literally breathes life into algae. Masked in a specially designed piece
> of biotechnology, an algae headdress, the opera singer, the algae, the 
> audience
> and I (watching documentation) form a strange relationship, a curious
> assemblage. The carbon dioxide in her breath feeds the algae, which later
> will be fed to the audience, so that they can literally “taste her song.”
>  In *The Algae Opera*, the head mask, attached to tubing which channels
> the breath to an algae tank, is a strange mixture of a Greek mask, a
> persona, and a beautiful lunglike filigree that looks like a seahorse.
> The singer feels part sea creature herself as she intones her algae
> opera. I listen to the voice as medium here, life-giving medium, medium
> for life. Meanwhile the other sense of medium merges into the undertones
> as, medium-like, the singer crosses an ether and connects me to another
> life form. And when the audience eats the algae, I sense that that they
> are actually ingesting the singer’s voice. In an odd way, the work makes
> me think about John Baldessari’s 1972 video of teaching a plant the
> alphabet. As far as I know (I wonder if anyone ever followed up with
> those plants?), that work was more humorous and conceptual than literal,
> in contrast to the literal relationships between plant life and voice
> that animate works made after the new materialist turn. And it is with
> new materialist ears that I encounter *The Algae **Opera *as it provokes
> a listening to breath between the human and nonhuman— opening an
> awareness of the vibrancy of breath and the productiveness of its
> connections. It voices and breathes life into a sense of intersubjectivity
> beyond the human.
>
>  Speaking of Whitehead and fermentation and guts, your post set thinking
> about my amazing acupuncturist, Mattie Sempert, who is a Whitehead scholar
> (part of the Sense Lab in Montreal) and essayist as well as acupuncturist —
> she is writing a book of essays about the entanglement of all of these.
> Anyway, her “twirling fingers” as she feels my gut to sense where to needle
> are in-touch with the life that my gut tspeak to her – attuning her to
> what’s happening throughout my whole body(/mind). It’s an amazing
> collaboration and as the needles start to work, my stomach gurgles
> appreciation and joy.
>
> best
>
> Norie
>
> www.out-of-sync.com
> 
>
> workingworms.net
> 
> unlikely.net.au
> 
>
> On 13 Oct 2017, at 5:19 AM, Tyler Fox  wrote:
>
> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Hello everyone,
>
> First, I also want to send my best wishes to April and Matt. I have
> friends and family in the same area, some who had to flee in the
> middle of the night with nothing more than pajamas and their cat
> (which, at least, is a thin silver lining). I am saddened for all,
> humans and nonhumans, dealing with such devastation.
>
> I would like to thank Margaretha for inviting me as a guest to this

Re: [-empyre-] (no subject)

[Norie Neumark]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hello Tyler and everyone

What a great post, Tyler, and wonderful to hear about your work. Perhaps you 
know about the algae opera by Michael Burton and Michiko Nitta?  
(http://www.burtonnitta.co.uk/algaeopera.html) 
. I haven’t seen it myself but 
read about it and accessed it online and was enchanted. Again, apologies for 
being lazy (if this is really bad net etiquette, let me know!) as I just put in 
an excerpt about the work from my Voicetracks book:

Breath also connects us to the place through which it resonates 
and the others in that place and in the shared medium of air. It not only 
connects people,  intersubjectively, it 
also connects people to animals and things,  voicing the connections between 
breath and the natural environment. I listen to this in The Algae   
 Opera of artists BurtonNitta (Michael Burton and Michiko Nitta), for 
example, which literally breathes life into the natural environment, giving 
voice to the   relationship between human breath and 
plant life on our planet. In this work, it is an opera singer’s copious voiced 
breath that literally breathes life into algae.
Masked in a specially designed piece of biotechnology, an algae headdress, the 
opera singer, the algae, the audience and I (watching documentation) form a 
strange  relationship, a curious assemblage. The carbon 
dioxide in her breath feeds the algae, which later will be fed to the audience, 
so that they can literally “taste hersong.”  In The 
Algae Opera, the head mask, attached to tubing which channels the breath to an 
algae tank, is a strange mixture of a Greek mask, a persona,  and a 
beautiful lunglike filigree that looks like a seahorse. The singer feels part 
sea creature herself as she intones her algae opera. I listen to the voice as 
mediumhere, life-giving medium, medium for life. 
Meanwhile the other sense of medium merges into the undertones as, medium-like, 
the singer crosses an ether and  connects me to 
another life form. And when the audience eats the algae, I sense that that they 
are actually ingesting the singer’s voice. In an odd way, the work  
 makes me think about John Baldessari’s 1972 video of teaching 
a plant the alphabet. As far as I know (I wonder if anyone ever followed up 
with those plants?), that work was more humorous and 
conceptual than literal, in contrast to the literal relationships between plant 
life and voice that animate works made after the new 
materialist turn. And it is with new materialist ears that I encounter The 
Algae Opera as it provokes a listening to breath between the human and 
nonhuman— opening an awareness of the vibrancy of 
breath and the productiveness of its connections. It voices and breathes life 
into a sense of intersubjectivity beyond the  human.

 Speaking of Whitehead and fermentation and guts, your post set thinking about 
my amazing acupuncturist, Mattie Sempert, who is a Whitehead scholar (part of 
the Sense Lab in Montreal) and essayist as well as acupuncturist — she is 
writing a book of essays about the entanglement of all of these. Anyway, her 
“twirling fingers” as she feels my gut to sense where to needle are in-touch 
with the life that my gut tspeak to her – attuning her to what’s happening 
throughout my whole body(/mind). It’s an amazing collaboration and as the 
needles start to work, my stomach gurgles appreciation and joy.

best

Norie

www.out-of-sync.com 

workingworms.net 

unlikely.net.au 
 

> On 13 Oct 2017, at 5:19 AM, Tyler Fox  wrote:
> 
> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Hello everyone,
> 
> First, I also want to send my best wishes to April and Matt. I have
> friends and family in the same area, some who had to flee in the
> middle of the night with nothing more than pajamas and their cat
> (which, at least, is a thin silver lining). I am saddened for all,
> humans and nonhumans, dealing with such devastation.
> 
> I would like to thank Margaretha for inviting me as a guest to this
> week. Also thanks to everyone for the wonderful posts with much to
> consider (terroirism, affection, enlivenment, grieving and resistance
> thereof, turtles and other turtles, listening, learning, and
> communicating with nonhuman collaborators…the list goes on). Just.
> Wow.
> 
> As Margaretha’s introduction 

Re: [-empyre-] (no subject)

[Casad, Madeleine]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
What a fantastic range of projects on the Blast Theory site.  Their brilliant 
app work Karen (2015) certainly belongs in this discussion.  Its framework of 
the “life coach” professional relationship points to a version of care that’s 
openly commodified, yet becomes realistically convoluted and compelling as the 
story unfolds.  It begins with intimacy as entertainment and ends with 
‘personality’ returned to you as a data report.  A gift of self-knowledge from 
the life coach – or?  Algorithmically probing the “unknown knowns” of the 
app-bound interlocutor’s unseen myriad of data traces…
 
mik


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Re: [-empyre-] (no subject)

[Alessandra Raengo]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Dear Simon 
 
aesthetics is found in the work and in the practice, so, from the outside, it 
can only be read.

 [And I know Tommy would not like this, but some of us are not are 
practitioners, so we “read” for form and aesthetics, so that it might perform 
its cultural work beyond the strict circle of the art-makers….  Drawing such a 
sharp line between practitioners and “receivers” might not allow this 
aesthetics-in-practice to be felt outside of where it is strictly taking place]

With the idea of liquid blackness I suggest that aesthetics and form should be 
read by attuning oneself to the ways they modulate the affective sensorium 
implied or enacted by the work. 

I don’t think that the essential ambiguity and ambivalence of liquid blackness 
resides in a collapsing of the aesthetics onto the analytic and vice versa. 
Instead,  I think this ambivalence is found in the realization that, many 
times, the same liquidity that promises fluidity of expansion, multiplicity, 
inclusiveness, etc. is also the liquidity that delivers the erotics of the 
racial encounter and therefore might undo these liberatory possibilities. 

This ambivalence means coming to terms with the fact the two poles of liquid 
blackness might very uncomfortably touch somewhere, in a place where it becomes 
very hard to disentangle their two radically different directions. 

Thank you, Johannes, for attaching an image of a Fred Wilson’s "Drip Drop 
Plop”, which I have written about in a forthcoming essay for the journal 
Discourse. I am looking forward to discussing it a bit more (and I am grateful 
to Derek for bringing it up and to Marisa for to that conversation as well) but 
I wanted to address Simon’s question first.

Still thinking about Tommy’s last post….

Alessandra




Alessandra Raengo, PhD
Associate Professor, Moving Image Studies
Department of Communication, Georgia State University
PO Box 5060, Atlanta GA 30302-5060
Office: 25 Park Place South, #1010
404 413-5691   
arae...@gsu.edu 
www.liquidblackness.com   
https://gsu.academia.edu/AlessandraRaengo   
http://gsucommunicationgradstudies.wordpress.com   


> On Apr 16, 2016, at 9:18 PM, simon  wrote:
> 
> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Dear Alessandra,
> 
> thank you for your reply. Along the pole of an analytic that is able to be 
> performed immanently, with aesthetic as well as analytical possibilities, is 
> there not a risk here of falling into what Whitehead called the "fallacy of 
> concretization"? The aesthetic dis-assumes the substance that the analytic 
> presumes; liquid disavows the concreteness that blackness needs for 
> analytical efficacy. (This is a common fallacy for rhetorics around 
> performativity and "immanent critique".)
> 
> But I have not yet read your essay and perhaps you answer this there.
> 
> Beckett, re-membering (it is not present in Augustine) St. Augustine's 
> "beautiful sentence": "Do not despair, one of the thieves was saved; do not 
> presume, one of the thieves was damned."
> 
> Best,
> Simon
> 
> On 17/04/16 02:13, Alessandra Raengo wrote:
>> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
>> Dear Simon,
>> 
>> liquid blackness is meant to do at least two things, which I have described 
>> in this discussion as its two poles:
>> one the one hand, it is meant to work as a diagnostic tool which helps us 
>> understand the tremendous amount of desire and affect that is attached to 
>> blackness, even when it is not immediately understood in racial terms (the 
>> way it works in Under the Skin, as already discussed, is a great example of 
>> that; or, as I have written about, the way it works in Nick Hooker’s video 
>> for Grace Jones, Corporate Cannibal: 
>> https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3a%2f%2fvimeo.com%2f1306326=01%7c01%7caraengo%40gsu.edu%7c8de44df21c304828f98c08d3666eedcd%7c515ad73d8d5e4169895c9789dc742a70%7c0=EpOl14Bkl8CD0K9UL1pO0XMRABqwUPP%2fWvOU1GgF%2fc0%3d
>>  ). So in this sense, I would not say that liquid blackness is wearable, but 
>> rather that it describes fantasies of wearability and immersion.
>> 
>> On the other hand “liquid blackness”  expresses aesthetic possibilities 
>> where blackness is understood to function as an expansive force. Here it can 
>> function also as a reading strategy that looks for lines of flight, modes of 
>> expansion, experimentation, and so on. It is post-identitarian, not in the 
>> sense that it leaves black people behind, but rather in the sense that it is 
>> not attached to a representational paradigm.
>> 
>> Since the beginning of this month’s discussion I have been trying to offer a 
>> short and snappy version of an essay I wrote to prepare for our first 
>> symposium on liquid blackness which had Derek Murray and Hamza Walker as 
>> keynotes (Spring 2014). Two weeks into our discussion I realize that there 
>> are a lot of moves 

Re: [-empyre-] (no subject) aesthetics

[Thomas F. DeFrantz]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
right, thanks friends.  this is all very helpful to think about possibilities 
and potential outcomes of any sort of work, and intellectual work in 
particular.  

I remain insistent on securing ideologies in experience, even in this context 
of imagining immanence that seems to want to be outside of experience, 
relationship, identity.  

as an artist, I think of aesthetics as practical strategies, rather than 
speculative renderings.  so for me, an 'aesthetics of reading' confuses;  
aesthetics might create relationship through craft, but for me they are not 
engaged primarily  by a 'receiver' who reads a performance or an object or a 
circumstance; they are created and engaged in concert with the artists who 
labor to create the social possibilities in their art.  

[maybe reading, in this context, becomes appreciation; as we might appreciate a 
performance rather than reduce it to the subject-object of being read by a 
theorist presumably outside of it.]

I want to trouble the waters where we encourage each other to work outside of 
narratives of family, relationship, shared skin and sweat, or boots on the 
ground, if you will.  it's fun work to imagine at a distance, but I find that 
the language that allows for the figure of the slave or that supports only 
interpretive strategies is also the language that objectifies us and makes us 
strange in the world.  of course I am strange to my nephews and colleagues, but 
I share creative projects that answer those relationships, on some level, 
directly.  my liquid blackness is experiential and rooted in my working through 
black aesthetics as practice.  if I want anything for you and your liquid 
blackness, it might be that you find ways to shift possibilities and resist 
fixing knowledges.  

I also want to trouble the waters in which creative output is treated with 
limited acknowledgment of the types of labor that produce it.  I am suspicious 
of writing about art as though varied media, approaches, or outcomes are 
equivalent.  film, sculpture, music, dance, theater, spoken word, or preaching 
are very different sorts of propositions in practice; I always find it odd to 
treat creative craft as a singularity.  for me, this approach tends to reify 
and stabilize the theorist, and diminish the creative impulse.  I continue to 
think that the hierarchical systems of citationality and universalizing 
ambitions of theorizing play weirdly into a re-racializing and subjugation of 
black aesthetics and black artistry.  

[don't explain it to me; help me understand how it incites you to feel...]

my hope as an educator in these conversations would be to recenter black people 
in theoretical discussions of blackness.  we've had centuries of philosophical 
tracts created to stabilize black abjection - and we might think about how 
immanence could be one of many.  how can we actually demonstrate our belief of 
black people creating possibility in the world through aesthetic practice, and 
if we wrote from among we people, rather than outside of them, what sorts of 
theoretical inventions would we create?  I imagine that these would be 
renderings available to more than the few hundred phds we already know.  for 
that to be true, we may have to stop relying on other people's labor in order 
to prove 'our' points.  

the academy has been built on a certain scaffolding that points toward an elite 
rendering accessible to a certain few.  but black performance and black 
aesthetics are available to all, in some ways.  how could we construct theory 
that actually answers black aesthetics in an availability? 

thanks for engaging these questions, and another time we will enjoy more 
conversation!

in motion, tommy



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Re: [-empyre-] (no subject)

[simon]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Dear Alessandra,

thank you for your reply. Along the pole of an analytic that is able to 
be performed immanently, with aesthetic as well as analytical 
possibilities, is there not a risk here of falling into what Whitehead 
called the "fallacy of concretization"? The aesthetic dis-assumes the 
substance that the analytic presumes; liquid disavows the concreteness 
that blackness needs for analytical efficacy. (This is a common fallacy 
for rhetorics around performativity and "immanent critique".)


But I have not yet read your essay and perhaps you answer this there.

Beckett, re-membering (it is not present in Augustine) St. Augustine's 
"beautiful sentence": "Do not despair, one of the thieves was saved; do 
not presume, one of the thieves was damned."


Best,
Simon

On 17/04/16 02:13, Alessandra Raengo wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Dear Simon,

liquid blackness is meant to do at least two things, which I have described in 
this discussion as its two poles:
one the one hand, it is meant to work as a diagnostic tool which helps us 
understand the tremendous amount of desire and affect that is attached to 
blackness, even when it is not immediately understood in racial terms (the way 
it works in Under the Skin, as already discussed, is a great example of that; 
or, as I have written about, the way it works in Nick Hooker’s video for Grace 
Jones, Corporate Cannibal: https://vimeo.com/1306326 ). So in this sense, I 
would not say that liquid blackness is wearable, but rather that it describes 
fantasies of wearability and immersion.

On the other hand “liquid blackness”  expresses aesthetic possibilities where 
blackness is understood to function as an expansive force. Here it can function 
also as a reading strategy that looks for lines of flight, modes of expansion, 
experimentation, and so on. It is post-identitarian, not in the sense that it 
leaves black people behind, but rather in the sense that it is not attached to 
a representational paradigm.

Since the beginning of this month’s discussion I have been trying to offer a 
short and snappy version of an essay I wrote to prepare for our first symposium 
on liquid blackness which had Derek Murray and Hamza Walker as keynotes (Spring 
2014). Two weeks into our discussion I realize that there are a lot of moves 
that essay makes which I cannot summarize without depleting the argument from 
some of its nuances. So, if you are so inclined, maybe some answers might be 
found there.

The essay is on our website (under “publications” and it’s contained in LB2), 
or you can access it through this link:
https://www.academia.edu/7234487/Blackness_Aesthetics_Liquidity

There I tried to show not only the ambivalence of liquid blackness but also how to move 
through it, so to speak, in order to perform what I am now beginning to understand might 
be some type of “immanent critique”. In this sense,  the challenge and the productivity 
of the idea of "liquid blackness" lies in the fact that it is a “lens” that 
matches its objects (a terrible metaphor in this case, because it’s not liquid at all) 
and yet it remains also always in excess of them.

This is why I believe that, even though one might get the sense that “liquid 
blackness” is everything and nothing at the same time, or that its ambivalence 
is so profound that it becomes useless, I actually think that it is something 
one has to get in the thick of, for it to work as an analytical tool.

I hope this helps.
I welcome these opportunities for clarification. I hope I was able to provide 
some

Alessandra




Alessandra Raengo, PhD
Associate Professor, Moving Image Studies
Department of Communication, Georgia State University
PO Box 5060, Atlanta GA 30302-5060
Office: 25 Park Place South, #1010
404 413-5691
arae...@gsu.edu
www.liquidblackness.com
https://gsu.academia.edu/AlessandraRaengo
http://gsucommunicationgradstudies.wordpress.com



On Apr 15, 2016, at 6:34 PM, simon  wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Dear <>, Derek, Alessandra,

a question, reentering the discussion, after confer(abs)ence (one that plays in 
some part into the discussion with its themes, Ritual & Cultural Performance, 
being a Hui and a Symposium, and having a strong Maori presence, liquidly 
endarkening ...) ... What, given its ambivalence, given it can suit the individual 
user or wearer, is liquid blackness meant to do?

(And in appreciation of the confer(abs)ence of a subject)

Best,
Simon

On 16/04/16 01:45, Derek Murray wrote:

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Hi Murat,

My apologies for the slow reply.

Blackness is a highly contested terminology, so I would say that my
definition of it would defer from the other respondents. Perhaps we
should individually define it? I suggest asking Tommy, since I was
initially responding to his query.

Derek

Re: [-empyre-] (no subject)

[Alessandra Raengo]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Dear Simon,

liquid blackness is meant to do at least two things, which I have described in 
this discussion as its two poles:
one the one hand, it is meant to work as a diagnostic tool which helps us 
understand the tremendous amount of desire and affect that is attached to 
blackness, even when it is not immediately understood in racial terms (the way 
it works in Under the Skin, as already discussed, is a great example of that; 
or, as I have written about, the way it works in Nick Hooker’s video for Grace 
Jones, Corporate Cannibal: https://vimeo.com/1306326 ). So in this sense, I 
would not say that liquid blackness is wearable, but rather that it describes 
fantasies of wearability and immersion. 

On the other hand “liquid blackness”  expresses aesthetic possibilities where 
blackness is understood to function as an expansive force. Here it can function 
also as a reading strategy that looks for lines of flight, modes of expansion, 
experimentation, and so on. It is post-identitarian, not in the sense that it 
leaves black people behind, but rather in the sense that it is not attached to 
a representational paradigm.

Since the beginning of this month’s discussion I have been trying to offer a 
short and snappy version of an essay I wrote to prepare for our first symposium 
on liquid blackness which had Derek Murray and Hamza Walker as keynotes (Spring 
2014). Two weeks into our discussion I realize that there are a lot of moves 
that essay makes which I cannot summarize without depleting the argument from 
some of its nuances. So, if you are so inclined, maybe some answers might be 
found there.

The essay is on our website (under “publications” and it’s contained in LB2), 
or you can access it through this link:
https://www.academia.edu/7234487/Blackness_Aesthetics_Liquidity  

There I tried to show not only the ambivalence of liquid blackness but also how 
to move through it, so to speak, in order to perform what I am now beginning to 
understand might be some type of “immanent critique”. In this sense,  the 
challenge and the productivity of the idea of "liquid blackness" lies in the 
fact that it is a “lens” that matches its objects (a terrible metaphor in this 
case, because it’s not liquid at all) and yet it remains also always in excess 
of them. 

This is why I believe that, even though one might get the sense that “liquid 
blackness” is everything and nothing at the same time, or that its ambivalence 
is so profound that it becomes useless, I actually think that it is something 
one has to get in the thick of, for it to work as an analytical tool.

I hope this helps. 
I welcome these opportunities for clarification. I hope I was able to provide 
some

Alessandra




Alessandra Raengo, PhD
Associate Professor, Moving Image Studies
Department of Communication, Georgia State University
PO Box 5060, Atlanta GA 30302-5060
Office: 25 Park Place South, #1010
404 413-5691   
arae...@gsu.edu 
www.liquidblackness.com   
https://gsu.academia.edu/AlessandraRaengo   
http://gsucommunicationgradstudies.wordpress.com   


> On Apr 15, 2016, at 6:34 PM, simon  wrote:
> 
> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Dear <>, Derek, Alessandra,
> 
> a question, reentering the discussion, after confer(abs)ence (one that plays 
> in some part into the discussion with its themes, Ritual & Cultural 
> Performance, being a Hui and a Symposium, and having a strong Maori presence, 
> liquidly endarkening ...) ... What, given its ambivalence, given it can suit 
> the individual user or wearer, is liquid blackness meant to do?
> 
> (And in appreciation of the confer(abs)ence of a subject)
> 
> Best,
> Simon
> 
> On 16/04/16 01:45, Derek Murray wrote:
>> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
>> Hi Murat,
>> 
>> My apologies for the slow reply.
>> 
>> Blackness is a highly contested terminology, so I would say that my
>> definition of it would defer from the other respondents. Perhaps we
>> should individually define it? I suggest asking Tommy, since I was
>> initially responding to his query.
>> 
>> Derek
>> ___
>> empyre forum
>> 
>> empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>> 
>> 
>> 
> 
> ___
> empyre forum
> empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3a%2f%2fempyre.library.cornell.edu=01%7c01%7caraengo%40gsu.edu%7c478180510173417d667b08d365952618%7c515ad73d8d5e4169895c9789dc742a70%7c0=qGC3a4hU0GljT0016QmA%2fPh2eR5ADzrjwc0QpD7J8W4%3d

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Re: [-empyre-] (no subject)

[Derek Murray]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Murat,

I took your last post as more of a comment than a question, but I
appreciate your clarification. I think your formation of "liquid
blackness" as not strictly racial is/can be productive, though in my
understanding of the notion, it has always meant to function in an
ambivalent manner, as Alessandra recently articulated.

Derek

On Fri, Apr 15, 2016 at 7:47 AM, Murat Nemet-Nejat  wrote:
> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Hi Derek,
>
> Let me clarify my position. I am a Jew from the Middle East who grew up in 
> Istanbul, but I have lived in the States for over forty years. Though I see 
> the issues raised by "liquid blackness" relevant and provocative, I do not 
> see them purely from a racial point of view. I saw "liquid blackness" as a 
> concept relevant to any discussion on the relationship between the powerful 
> and the oppressed or suppressed or manipulated. For me the consciousness of 
> "liquid blackness" provided a way to fight, to be less susceptible to 
> psychological or cultural manipulation. It was basically, as I saw it, a 
> political concept. That is why I brought in the subject of using the word 
> "Nigger" in the title of my translation "The Nigger In the Photograph." In my 
> use of it, the word did not refer to race, but a boy prostitute--of course, 
> making a link of brotherhood so to speak, between that boy who was an urchin 
> on Istanbul docks and the black in the United States. During this past week, 
> I felt the
  discussion was much more strictly racial, black artists/thinkers speaking to 
black artists/thinkers. The quote I included in my previous post starting the 
post "'what if we all took time to
> make black art?'..." referred to that.
>
> Ciao,
> Murat
>
> On Fri, Apr 15, 2016 at 9:45 AM, Derek Murray 
>  wrote:
>>
>> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
>> Hi Murat,
>>
>> My apologies for the slow reply.
>>
>> Blackness is a highly contested terminology, so I would say that my
>> definition of it would defer from the other respondents. Perhaps we
>> should individually define it? I suggest asking Tommy, since I was
>> initially responding to his query.
>>
>> Derek
>> ___
>> 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
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Re: [-empyre-] (no subject)

[Murat Nemet-Nejat]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hi Derek,

Let me clarify my position. I am a Jew from the Middle East who grew up in
Istanbul, but I have lived in the States for over forty years. Though I see
the issues raised by "liquid blackness" relevant and provocative, I do not
see them purely from a racial point of view. I saw "liquid blackness" as a
concept relevant to any discussion on the relationship between the powerful
and the oppressed or suppressed or manipulated. For me the consciousness of
"liquid blackness" provided a way to fight, to be less susceptible to
psychological or cultural manipulation. It was basically, as I saw it, a
political concept. That is why I brought in the subject of using the word
"Nigger" in the title of my translation "The Nigger In the Photograph." In
my use of it, the word did not refer to race, but a boy prostitute--of
course, making a link of brotherhood so to speak, between that boy who was
an urchin on Istanbul docks and the black in the United States. During this
past week, I felt the discussion was much more strictly racial, black
artists/thinkers speaking to black artists/thinkers. The quote I included
in my previous post starting the post "'what if we all took time to
make black art?'..." referred to that.

Ciao,
Murat

On Fri, Apr 15, 2016 at 9:45 AM, Derek Murray <
derekconradmurray6...@gmail.com> wrote:

> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> Hi Murat,
>
> My apologies for the slow reply.
>
> Blackness is a highly contested terminology, so I would say that my
> definition of it would defer from the other respondents. Perhaps we
> should individually define it? I suggest asking Tommy, since I was
> initially responding to his query.
>
> Derek
> ___
> empyre forum
> empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>
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Re: [-empyre-] (no subject)

[Florian Weil]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Dear Graham Teeple,

I totally agree with you that the Human Plant Interaction should investigated more. The possible interactions could be not only in one direction, it has many different forms. An plant interface could also works on our visual sense as well as the tactile senses. Beyond that many different applications can be implemented like connected plants, interaction between plants and environments and so on. I did a research on these topics, which might be interesting for you all:



http://blog.derhess.de/human-plant-interfaces/





 jsa

Thank you very much for explaining and sharing your sensor approach in such a detail with us!



All the best from Berlin

Florian

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Re: [-empyre-] (no subject)

[Živa Pikaja]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--A warm hello to everyone!

My name is Špela Petrič. I'm a biologist who was too curious about the
strings attached to science to stay and have been wandering in the realm of
art to see if living systems shine differently through the multitude of
optic systems we could (but don't necessarily choose to) employ.

Albeit they were never particularly my cup of tea, I've been (almost
coincidentally - ha, should I admit to pragmatism?) forcing myself onto
plants and abusing them at workshops, in artworks and on my window sill for
several years. It seemed only fair I should lay bare my neck, face my
schizoid humanity and commit to the quixotic task of confronting vegetal
otherness.

And here I am, two years later, gleefully reading this thread that in a few
email exchanges voices the evident (but far from obvious) disconcerted
inflections of (human)V(plant).

When it comes to overcoming anthropocentrism, especially in regards to
plant life where a true empathic relationship is questionable (see Marder, The
Life of Plants and the Limits of Empathy
http://www.michaelmarder.org/app/download/5864710661/M.Marder.Life.of.Plants.Empathy.pdf?t=1431562863),
it seems that are we must accept this natural sciences joke: Theoretically
is should be possible to achieve it in practice, but practically it holds
true only in theory.

I therefore think that the critique of shortcomings in such artistic
endeavours is precisely what we should fall upon when defining the ethical
grounds for the relationship to the non-human Other. Through this
questioning it becomes apparent that, while an extremely effective blow the
the Western cosmology, we are nevertheless embedded in it. Exercises in
interface-based plant-to-human experiences effectively (through affect)
rattle our curious assumption that reality is somehow objective, somehow
out there, while simultaneously (mis)lead us to conclude that time is all
we need to understand what it is like to be a plant.

That said, I also believe that only when working with/growing/observing
plants over a longer period of time does this alien group of living beings
begin to authentically displaces our perception of them -- and,
consequently, of ourselves. I wonder if an observer/visitor served with the
output of projects built on not only a huge amount of scientific
understanding, but also on the utter commitment of the artist, ever truly
grasps the herculean patience and meekness involved in the dance of agency
which ultimately becomes a display of the (un)hidden zoe (and bios :) of
plant life...

Lastly, to give my answer to Graham on the topic of technological
interfaces: I think these technological translations are user-friendly and
might even be condemned as superficial (ultimately we are much more
accustomed connecting to technology than to plants, which might be
understood as undermining the purpose), but one shouldn't overlook the
importance of these works as persistent, perhaps even programmatic
explorations of the embodiment of critical posthumanism, whose ideals are
hence tested in practice. Also, by undergoing the lengthy process of
plant-imbued artwork manifestation, the artists become sensitised to the
Other in a way that permanently changes their vantage point, themselves
becoming a breeding ground for an adjacent future not possible without such
experiences.

Best,
Špela

2015-06-07 2:09 GMT+02:00 Graham Teeple grahamtee...@gmail.com:

 --empyre- soft-skinned space--
 Wow! What a wonderful discussion to find.
 I am also sorry to be joining in so late.

 Patrick and Murat - your discussion about the world beyond humans is one I
 love and fear thinking about.
 Projects like these are such great tools for testing the
 limits/limitations.

 My mind has been spiralling into the human, interspecies, and cyborg
 dimensions of these projects.

 I am a gardener and curator. I am familiar with Yi and Jasmeen's work in
 its first iteration presented at Grow Op 2015 this spring, which I helped
 organize.
 Jo - I have heard about your project, and it is wonderful to read these
 details and anecdotes.

 To Yi and Jo:

 I'm thinking about how human technology is often an essential collaborator
 when it comes to human-plant connections.
 Leaving plants to the side for a moment, I'm wondering how would you
 describe the connection between participants and the technology you are
 using in these projects?
 Does it feel like an easier, or maybe natural, way to connect with others?
 Or maybe it presents its own perceptual challenges to participants?

 And Jo - I'm wondering if you could speak about how the plants might have
 responded to THEIR intimate connection with human technology. Hard to say,
 I know, but have you noticed changes in the plants after connecting or
 disconnecting them?

 Thank so much for all your comments.

 Graham







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