<div dir="ltr">
<p class="MsoNormal">Hi Renate, Christina, Tim, and others in the contamination
conversation,<span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Last week brought up some really key ideas around
contamination and boundaries that it assumes between organic units or states.
My research is on epidemic media, specifically focuses on how humans have
learned to “live with” pathogenic viruses. I am writing a book titled “The
Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media,” which essentially looks at the role of
media in living with viruses: that is, how do media modify biological processes
so as to “intervene,” as Anna Tsing puts it, in planetary damage. I’m excited
Tsing’s and Haraway’s pathbreaking works are already in the discussion—they are
central to the project.<span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">After
all, the Human Microbiome Project confirms microbial cells weighing as little
as 200 grams outnumber human cells 10 to 1. The “new biology,” argues Rodney Dietert (<i>The Human Superorganism: How the Microbiome
is Revolutionizing the Pursuit of Healthy Life</i>, 2016), suggests humans are
multispecies “super-organisms” and not a single species at all. And yet,
there is cause for alarm
when a new species relation endangers one species at individual and populational
scale. This is what happens when new viruses skip into new populations. At that
point, we think about contamination as contagion. When the imminent takeover of one species by another--virus proliferation killing off hosts--is at hand, technological interventions materialize a series of mediatic interfaces. For example, living as undetectable with HIV is one such interface realized as numeric threshold. Such interfaces separate microbial and human life; they are not ontological barriers but a series of effects (as media theorist, Alex Galloway calls them) contrused to regulate
the existing or the potential coexistence of different species. Because these interfaces build livable microbial-human futures; because they enable multispecies accommodations, I think
of them as <i>environmental media</i>. <span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Yet every time I say I’m writing a book on epidemic media,
folks think I’m writing about contagion as purely negative—you know, the contagion media that enthrone
human heroism against pathogenic hordes. There is excellent scholarship on contagion
fiction and non-fiction, movies and television shows, video games and comic
books. Fed a steady diet of realistic fictional outbreak narratives and
apocalyptic futures, we have become comfortably numb to the horror of coming
plagues: to the symptomatic Ebola infection-like hemorrhage, to the inevitable
segregation of the sick and the well, to the tales of military heroism and
scientific triumph. Ebola plays the phantom microbe in these contagion media;
it is the iconic instance of the resurgent bugs that scientist Joshua Lederberg
once christened “the deadliest threat to mankind.” We have grown accustomed to
its sudden emergences and drug-resistant mutations after the outbreaks of
Marburg, Ebola, and HIV in the early 1980s. The introduction of a new
course in infectious diseases at the Center for Disease Control in 1985, argues
Melinda Cooper, serves as one marker for crossing the historical threshold into
the age of “viral storms. In popular discourse, Laurie Garrett’s non-fictional <i>The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases
in a World Out of Balance</i> (1994) was the
tipping point for public panic. Since then “living with” such deadly pathogens, living in anticipation
of the next outbreak has become historical necessity. </p><p class="MsoNormal"><br></p><p class="MsoNormal">That
panic is now folded into the productive agendas of living as multispecies. Here, Anna Tsing is a key thinker, urging us to intervene in the “blasted ruins
of the Anthropocene” (<i>The Mushroom at the
End of the World</i>, 2017). The idea is not to return to a mythic
natural contract, but to live among the ruins, to act among the ruins, to tend
the garden. For Tsing, even “the most promising oasis of natural plenty
requires massive intervention” (85). The real question is which natural and
social disturbances can we live with? Which ones command our attention?</p><p class="MsoNormal"><span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">This is the ecological angle—I thought it has a good
resonance with last week’s concerns on residual contamination. I’ll post later
on how contamination re virality has been taken up in media studies. <span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br></p><p class="MsoNormal">cheers,</p><p class="MsoNormal">Bishnu</p>
</div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Nov 12, 2017 at 8:40 PM, Renate Terese Ferro <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:rferro@cornell.edu" target="_blank">rferro@cornell.edu</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------<br>
I would like to welcome Bishnu Ghosh, Christina McPhee, and Tim Murray to Week two of our discussion. All of these guests our friends our subscribers all know from past years of participation on –empyre- and in their research and writing. . Bishnu Gosh has been a strong advocate and leader in the fields of cultural globalization and humanities. We were so lucky to teach with her at Cornell at the Society for the Humanities when the topic was RISK from 2012 to 2113 <a href="https://societyhumanities.as.cornell.edu/2012-13-risk" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://societyhumanities.as.<wbr>cornell.edu/2012-13-risk</a><br>
Christina McPhee worked closely with us on this –empyre- platform organizing and moderating many years of –empyre- discussions. Her work as a painter and artist are simulations of evolving life-forms. Tim Murray ,also a long-time facilitator on –empyre-, has created web-platforms, writings, and curatorial projects evolving around the issues of environmental risk and contamination. I have attached their biographies below. Thanks to all of you for joining in.<br>
<br>
Catherine and Marissa I hope you will also chime in throughout the rest of the month when your schedules permit. Thank you again for getting us started.<br>
Best to all of you.<br>
Renate<br>
<br>
Biographies<br>
Bishnupriya Ghosh (US) teaches global media studies at UC Santa Barbara’s Departments of English and Global Studies. Her first monograph, When Borne Across: Literary Cosmopolitics in the Contemporary Indian Novel (Rutgers UP, 2004) addressed cultural globalization and the market for world literatures; and her second, Global Icons: Apertures into the Global (Duke UP, 2011) focused on globally circulating iconic images that constitute media environments. Around 2009, Ghosh turned to research on risk media from perspectives in the humanities. Both her current projects arise from this turn: she is writing her third monograph, *The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media,* and co-editing *The Routledge Handbook on Media and Risk* (forthcoming 2018).<br>
<br>
Christina McPhee’s (US) 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 drawing, in both her analogue and digital works, is a seduction into surface-skidding calligraphies and mark-making. Her work is in the museum collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New Museum-Rhizome Artbase, and International Center for Photography, New York; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City; and Thresholds New Media Collection, Scotland. Solo museum exhibitions include the American University Museum, Washington, D.C., and Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden. She has participated in group exhibitions, notably documenta 12 (Magazine Project) with -empyre-, Bucharest Biennial 3, Museum of Modern Art Medellin, Bildmuseet Umea, and Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive at the University of California. A new book, “Christina McPhee: A Commonplace Book,” edited by Eileen Joy, is a collection of essays by international critics and artists, is out this autumn with Punctum Books. <a href="https://punctumbooks.com/titles/christina-mcphee-a-commonplace-book/" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://punctumbooks.com/<wbr>titles/christina-mcphee-a-<wbr>commonplace-book/</a> <a href="http://www.christinamcphee.net" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://www.christinamcphee.net</a><br>
<br>
Tim Murray (US) is a Professor of Comparative Literature and English and Curator of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art in the Cornell Library. A curator of new media and contemporary art, and theorist of visual studies and digital culture, he has been forging international intersections in exhibition and print between the arts, humanities, and technology for over twenty-five years. He is currently the Director of Cornell Council for the Arts at Cornell. He has been a moderator for -empyre since 2007.<br>
<br>
A recipient of fellowships and grants from NEA, NEH, Mellon, Rockefeller, Fulbright, and Korea National Research Foundation, Murray is currently working on a book, Archival Events @ New Media Art, which is a sequel to Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds (Minnesota, 2008). Among his publications are the books Medium Philosophicum: Thinking Art Technologically (Universidad de Murcia, forthcoming, 2017), Zonas de Contacto: el arte en CD-Rom (Centro de la Imagen, 1999), Drama Trauma: Specters of Race and Sexuality in Performance, Video, Art (Routledge, 1997), Like a Film: Ideological Fantasy on Screen, Camera, and Canvas (Routledge, 1993), Theatrical Legitimation: Allegories of Genius In XVIIth-Century England and France (Oxford, 1987), ed. with Alan Smith, Repossessions: Psychoanalysis and the Phantasms of Early-Modern Culture (Minnesota, 1998), ed., Mimesis, Masochism & Mime: The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought (Michigan, 1997), ed. Xu Bing’s Background Story and his Oeuvre (Mandarin), co-edited with Yang Shin-Yi (Beijing: Life Bookstore Publishing, 2016), and ed. with Irving Goh of The Prepositional Senses of Jean-Luc Nancy, 2 Vols., diacritics (2014-16).<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
Renate Ferro<br>
Visiting Associate Professor<br>
Director of Undergraduate Studies<br>
Department of Art<br>
-empyre- moderator<br>
<br>
<br>
______________________________<wbr>_________________<br>
empyre forum<br>
<a href="mailto:empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au">empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.<wbr>edu.au</a><br>
<a href="http://empyre.library.cornell.edu" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://empyre.library.cornell.<wbr>edu</a></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><div><br></div>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div>Professor Bishnupriya Ghosh</div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px">Department of English and Global Studies</span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px">3431 South Hall</span></div><div dir="ltr"><div>UC Santa Barbara</div><div>Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3170</div><div><br></div><div><br></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>
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