<div dir="ltr">Hello All, <div><br></div><div>Many thanks again to Sonarya, Dorothy, <span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px">Morehshin, and Claudia for your compelling and provocative questions and sharing of your amazing work!! I really hope we can also meet IRL to continue this discussion and this working through. </span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px">My apologies again for the delay on my response post, I receive the daily digest and I still don't know how to change this, and now that we've come close to the end of the series, I realize it may be best to stay with the daily format. But it reminds me of temporality, and how I receive all the posts at the end of the day, of each day, which made it challenging to respond immediately to the individual emails, but the daily digest also offers a different kind of temporal engagement with these feminist questions, especially around the medium and form of the email. </span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px">Three years ago, I participated in my first empyre discussion in a queer new media art forum led by zach blas and micha cardenas, and at the time I was in Seoul traveling, and I remember having a different time relationship with the temporal relationship with the messages, and email exchanges, which has been productive for me to feel that I can slow down with the daily digest and think through time. </span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px">I had a really interesting discussion today with another feminist poet about the possibilities of internet culture, especially around publishing work on poetics and identity that resists the speed and reductionism of the comment sections of an op-ed, for example. How can we utilize the space and form of the internet and problemtize? One way may be as empyre does, utilizing the email as a form to build discussion and community around new media art and other topics vital to work through. Most of the empyre messages are not only one line responses (although this is not to say minimalistic is not thoughtful) but the longer messages themselves, run quite contrary to what digital culture often espouses in terms of speed and efficiency</span><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px">. I really appreciate this space, and wish we had more time. </span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px">Did anyone else love reading I Am Very Into You, a series of emails between Kathy Acker and Mckenzie Wark recently published by Semiotext(e)? I loved reading the book this year. I found their email exchanges to be so incredibly intimate, moving, and feminist. The messages were quite long, thoughtful, funny, provocative, yes, with the intent to woo and seduce, but also to push forward ideas around gender, feminism, sex, sexuality, and love. I highly recommend this book if you haven't read yet: </span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"><a href="http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/im-very-you">http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/im-very-you</a></span><br></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px">I'm digressing a bit from the conversation questions, but I do think thinking through time, feminism, and the email as form relates to the questions Claudia, Dorothy, and Soraya raised about new media and the problematics of new media art as oppressive, ie military corporate etc, and relations with women, queers, people of color representation. I believe this relationship and history, of technology design often created by and for oppressive & violent structures and the seduction or laziness of new media aesthetics succumbing to reiterating those oppressive structures, is very important to grapple with, and we should always remain reflexive when we are working with technology. </span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px">But as a feminist engaged with new media art, I also believe technology is malleable and if we understand techne as a tool, we, as in feminists, can and must utilize our tools for projects of resistance. </span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px">a question or two from the feminist possible: </span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px">- how is email a productive feminist tool for dialogue and change? </span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px">- can we understand technology as living and growing, transforming as it changes from one pair of hands to another? </span><br></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px">I want to raise that it feels important to consider how technology is not static, but much like race, gender, sexuality, a formation is always undergoing processes of shape shifting.</span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px">Unfortunately, oftentimes technology, and more specifically new media art, may emerge into work that reifies a corporate/military esthetic, but I think it's important to identity that when technology is a formation process, there is space to intervene. </span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px">It is 2: 17 am in Los Angeles. </span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px">I am thinking about televisions, wires, and circuits, and how all of these technological things change depending on how and who solders, and how and if we connect </span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"><br></span></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Apr 27, 2015 at 7:00 PM, <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:empyre-request@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au" target="_blank">empyre-request@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">Send empyre mailing list submissions to<br>
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----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------<br>
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Today's Topics:<br>
<br>
1. Re: Welcome to Week 4 on -empyre-: New Media / Art /<br>
Representation (Soraya Murray)<br>
2. a brief interuption: May topic open call (Renate Terese Ferro)<br>
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Message: 1<br>
Date: Mon, 27 Apr 2015 10:35:52 -0700<br>
From: Soraya Murray <<a href="mailto:semurray@ucsc.edu">semurray@ucsc.edu</a>><br>
To: soft_skinned_space <<a href="mailto:empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au">empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au</a>><br>
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Welcome to Week 4 on -empyre-: New Media / Art<br>
/ Representation<br>
Message-ID: <<a href="mailto:B0CD9BBD-560A-4A17-A9B5-BEC013F6AADC@ucsc.edu">B0CD9BBD-560A-4A17-A9B5-BEC013F6AADC@ucsc.edu</a>><br>
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Dear All,<br>
<br>
Thank you all for this wonderful discussion! I'm sure there are lots of lurkers, and I hope you'll all join in, given this special opportunity to have an audience with this unique group of artists.<br>
<br>
I am responding to Claudia's post, who is in turn responding to Dorothy Santos... the former's intriguing point (below) that really blurs the line between form and content for new media in a way that I think is productive.<br>
<br>
>From all of your very different kinds of work, I can see that all of it is in tension, or in some way grappling with, the formal tendency of new media toward the "corporate aesthetic", ordered , and bureaucratic. The struggle with form/universalism as a kind of identity politics (as opposed to standing outside of identity) is something that I've written about before (see my co-authored "Uneasy Bedfellows" essay at: <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00043249.2006.10791193#" target="_blank">http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00043249.2006.10791193#</a>) and I won't rehearse the argument here. But as artists choosing tools associated with the industrial, the corporatized, the relentlessly organized, the mass media, the military simulation, I ask this:<br>
How would you describe the site at which you break this connection? Where and how do you determine the site of your own intervention, given that it's likely your audiences/participants already experience these technologies in their lives, but in a very different mode?<br>
<br>
Many thanks,<br>
Soraya<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
><br>
> Citing Claudia Hart from a previous post:<br>
><br>
> I actually very much do believe that esthetics and formal languages are radically significant and important to study. The formal language embraced by new media art and high tech is generally corporatist and bureaucratic. It emerges from the International Style that was embraced by corporate industrial design, architecture and for the most part, Greenberg-ian formalist abstraction and American Minimalist art. Nineties identity art was created in rebellion against these dominant languages which had become a kind of hegemony.<br>
> [...]<br>
> The problem for me with almost all of new media art is that it embraces and is a manifestation of this kind corporate esthetic. It embraces that esthetic, and therefore the same corporatist machine values: the assembly line, economic efficiency over the humanitarian ? time equals money, etc., etc. Call me an old hippy; I guess it?s true.<br>
><br>
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Message: 2<br>
Date: Tue, 28 Apr 2015 00:08:28 +0000<br>
From: Renate Terese Ferro <<a href="mailto:rferro@cornell.edu">rferro@cornell.edu</a>><br>
To: soft_skinned_space <<a href="mailto:empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au">empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au</a>><br>
Subject: [-empyre-] a brief interuption: May topic open call<br>
Message-ID: <<a href="mailto:D16447BB.1E72D%25rtf9@cornell.edu">D16447BB.1E72D%rtf9@cornell.edu</a>><br>
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Sorry Soraya for the interruption but I wanted to invite any of our<br>
subscribers to think about joining our open call for May. Brief info is<br>
below. Email me asap if you want to participate.<br>
Renate<br>
<br>
May on -empyre: Boredom: Labor, use, time<br>
An open call to cross-disciplinary writers, artists, technologists and<br>
others who want to join our May topic on the concept of boredom. Boredom<br>
as a conceptual/theoretical motif. Boredom as<br>
a lack but also the excessive immersion of something that leads to a null<br>
or void. Boredom, neither positive or negative, but a potential that opens<br>
up critical consideration about the use of technology, labor, duration,<br>
use, time, and tempo. Boredom not boring.<br>
<br>
Contact: <a href="mailto:rferro@cornell.edu">rferro@cornell.edu</a><br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
Renate Ferro<br>
Visiting Assistant Professor of Art,Cornell University<br>
Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office: 306<br>
Ithaca, NY 14853<br>
Email: <<a href="mailto:rferro@cornell.edu">rferro@cornell.edu</a> <mailto:<a href="mailto:rtf9@cornell.edu">rtf9@cornell.edu</a>>><br>
URL: <a href="http://www.renateferro.net" target="_blank">http://www.renateferro.net</a> <<a href="http://www.renateferro.net/" target="_blank">http://www.renateferro.net/</a>><br>
<a href="http://www.privatesecretspubliclies.net" target="_blank">http://www.privatesecretspubliclies.net</a><br>
<<a href="http://www.privatesecretspubliclies.net/" target="_blank">http://www.privatesecretspubliclies.net/</a>><br>
Lab: <a href="http://www.tinkerfactory.net" target="_blank">http://www.tinkerfactory.net</a> <<a href="http://www.tinkerfactory.net/" target="_blank">http://www.tinkerfactory.net/</a>><br>
<br>
Managing Co-moderator of -empyre- soft skinned space<br>
<a href="http://empyre.library.cornell.edu/" target="_blank">http://empyre.library.cornell.edu/</a><br>
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End of empyre Digest, Vol 124, Issue 25<br>
***************************************<br>
</blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><div><br></div>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr">Margaret Rhee, Ph.D. <div><br><div><div>Institute of American Cultures Visiting Researcher </div><div>Asian American Studies Center </div><div>University of California, Los Angeles.</div></div><div><br><div><br></div></div></div></div></div>
</div>