<div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default"><div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font face="times new roman, serif">Dear everyone, </font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font face="times new roman, serif"><br></font></div><div><font face="times new roman, serif"><font style="color:rgb(33,33,33)"><font color="#000000"><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Thank you Renate for your incredible curation and mentorship with --empyre--, it's such an inspiring community of thinkers, artists, and activists. I loved the discussion on Trans last month, and hope to continue these threads. For this month I'm pleased to share a forum "</span></font></font><font color="#000000">On Practice and Play: Gestures Across Genres." The forum was inspired in part by Tony Conrad's work and practice which spans across film, music, writing, and theory. For this forum, we're honored to have artists, thinkers, and creators who play across media and disciplinary divides and </font> to celebrate innovation in cross-disciplinary art practices<span style="color:rgb(0,0,0)">. For the first week, we begin with a focus on Tony Conrad's work on art/collaboration/and play and we're honored to have artists Paige Sarlin, David Grubbs, and Kathleen McDermott join us for the discussion. Please see below for their biographies and we look forward to hearing more about their </span><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0)">work and insights on collaboration/play/art in Tony's collaborations, their own practices. As always we welcome --empyre--members to contribute and join the </span><font color="#000000"><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">conversation. </span></font></font></div><div><font color="#000000" face="times new roman, serif"><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><br></span></font></div><div><font color="#000000" face="times new roman, serif"><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">my best, </span></font></div><div><font color="#000000" face="times new roman, serif"><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><br></span></font></div><div><font color="#000000" face="times new roman, serif"><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Margaret </span></font></div><div><font color="#000000" face="times new roman, serif"><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><br></span></font></div><div><font color="#000000" face="times new roman, serif"><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">---- </span></font></div><font color="#212121" face="times new roman, serif"><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"><br></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"><b>On Practice and Play: Gestures Across Genres </b></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"><br></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0)">In this month's -empyre- forum, we take up the question of productivity and and the politics of play, and how playing across genres, mediums, forms, disciplines, and departments, etc. makes for new kinds of innovative art, thinking, and community; and in doing so, better intervenes and gestures toward transformative futures. The current conspiracy-us versus them- culture perhaps exemplifies the problem of singular thinking and the need for creative, eclectic, and innovative practices more than ever. We’re interested in artists, thinkers, and activists with practices that cross over boundaries and intervene in dichotomous logics. With attention to justice, we explore how multiple forms of art practices prompt us to reimagine different kind of worlds, as strategy and survival. Initially inspired by Tony Conrad's work, as his practice spans across film, music, writing, and sculptures, we playfully ask how play lends itself to more libratory ways of creation and practice. </div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"><br></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0)">We begin with the first week on media and new media art in conversation with Tony Conrad's playful work across mediums, we then move into a second week asking questions on poetry and playing across the visual, cinematic, and theoretical, the third week is dedicated to the theme of ethnography across forms such as photography, film, and poetry, and the forth week focuses on the ways artists advocate for decolonial and racial resistance through playing across genres and forms. While seemingly diverse, we hope the loosely organized topics lends itself to connections between the weeks, and across themes presented. With attention to questions such as capital, creativity, institutional critique, and justice, we’re honored to have the following artists and thinkers join us for this conversation and reflect on the possibilities of practice, gestures, and play.</div></font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="2" color="#212121" face="times new roman, serif"><br></font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="2" color="#212121" face="times new roman, serif">We also invite our -empyre- subscribers, whose own work broadly resonates with the themes of practice and play, to join the conversation. What are the ways your practice has played or plays across genres? Have you faced institutional challenges in crossing disciplinary divides, and if so, how did you overcome them? Is play and practice productive and/or political? We welcome our guests and all -empyre- subscribers to actively participate and post this month and share your practices and experiences of playing across genres and any questions that arise. Thank you again to our featured guests, and we're honored for their participation. We look forward to the conversation. </font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="2" color="#212121" face="times new roman, serif"><br></font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="2" color="#212121" face="times new roman, serif"><b>On Practice and Play: Gestures Across Genres </b><br></font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="2" color="#212121" face="times new roman, serif"><br></font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="2" color="#212121" face="times new roman, serif"><b>Week One: Art/Collaboration and Play </b><br></font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="2" color="#212121" face="times new roman, serif"><b>Honoring the play of Tony Conrad </b></font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="2" color="#212121" face="times new roman, serif">(October 1) <br></font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="2" color="#212121" face="times new roman, serif"><br></font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="2" color="#212121" face="times new roman, serif"><b>Paige Sarlin </b></font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="2" color="#212121" face="times new roman, serif"><div style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border-width:0px"><font size="2"><div style="margin:13px 0px 16px;padding:0px;border-width:0px">Paige Sarlin is an artist, scholar, and political activist. She holds a Ph.D. in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University and an M.F.A. in Film/Video/New Media from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her first feature-length documentary film, <i>The Last Slide Projector</i>, premiered at the Rotterdam International Film Festival in 2007. "Illuminating Obsolescence: Eastman Kodak's Carousel Slide Projector and the Work of Ending," her corresponding essay, was recently published in <i>The Routledge</i><i> Companion to Media Technology and Obsolescenc</i>e (2019). From 1999 to 2010, she was an active participant in the 16Beaver Group in New York City, a platform for the discussion of the intersection of art and politics. Her writings have been published in <i>October, Re-Thinking Marxism, </i><i>Discourse</i><i>, </i><i>Camera Obscura, </i><i>The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, </i>and<i> Framework: A Journal of Film and Culture</i>. She is in the process of finishing her book-length manuscript entitled <i>Interview</i><i> </i><i>Work: The Genealogy of a </i><i>Documentary</i><i> Form</i>. She is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Study at University at Buffalo, SUNY.<br></div></font></div><div style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px"><font size="2">Married to Tony Conrad at the time of his death, Paige was involved in the conceptualization and realization of the recent exhibition <i>Introducing Tony Conrad: A Retrospective</i>. Her essay "In Person, On Screen, In Context, On Tape," appears in the <a href="https://www.artbook.com/9783960983361.html" target="_blank">catalogue</a>. Tony and Paige's collaborative composition "Tony Conrad's Amplified Drone Strings" premiered at the Big Ears festival in 2016. Since then she has performed the piece with David Grubbs, MV Carbon, Jennifer Walshe, and others at the Tate Modern in London, The National Gallery in Washington DC, and the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center in New York. Her next book project is a collection of essays about Tony Conrad; entitled <i>You Know Who You Are</i>, the book is structured around an investigation of "the acknowledgement" as an aesthetic form.</font></div><div><br></div></font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="2" color="#212121" face="times new roman, serif"><b>David Grubbs </b><br></font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="2" color="#212121" face="times new roman, serif"><br></font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="2" color="#212121" face="times new roman, serif"><div style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px">David Grubbs is Professor of Music at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. At Brooklyn College he also teaches in the MFA programs in Performance and Interactive Media Arts (PIMA) and Creative Writing. He is the author of <i>Now that the audience is assembled</i><i> </i>and <i>Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording</i><i> </i>(both Duke University Press) and, with Anthony McCall, <i>Simultaneous Soloists</i><i> </i>(Pioneer Works Press). In the spring of 2020, Duke University Press will publish <i>The Voice in the Headphones</i>, Grubbs’s second experiment in music writing in the form of a book-length poem. </div><div style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px"> </div><div style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px">Grubbs has released fourteen solo albums and appeared on more than 190 releases; his most recent solo recording is <i>Creep Mission</i>(Blue Chopsticks, 2017). In 2000, his <i>The Spectrum Between</i>(Drag City) was named “Album of the Year” in the London <i>Sunday Times</i>. He is known for his ongoing cross-disciplinary collaborations with poet Susan Howe and visual artists Anthony McCall and Angela Bulloch, and his work has been presented at, among other venues, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, MoMA, the Tate Modern, and the Centre Pompidou. Grubbs was a member of the groups Gastr del Sol, Bastro, and Squirrel Bait, and has performed with Tony Conrad, Pauline Oliveros, the Red Krayola, Will Oldham, Loren Connors, and many others. He is a grant recipient from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a contributing editor in music for <i>BOMB</i><i>Magazine</i>, a member of the Blank Forms board of directors, and director of the Blue Chopsticks record label. <br></div><br></font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="2" color="#212121" face="times new roman, serif"><b>Kathleen McDermott </b><br></font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="2" color="#212121" face="times new roman, serif"><br></font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="2" color="#212121" face="times new roman, serif"><div style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px"><font size="2">McDermott’s work utilizes a combination of sculpture, open-source electronics, performance and video, to explore the social ramifications of the relationship between bodies and technology; an artistic research method she refers to as </font><font size="2"><i>absurdist electronics</i></font><font size="2">. Absurdist electronics promotes the use of absurdity as a counter to both the solutionist utopia promised by tech companies, and the atmosphere of doom often prophesied within science fiction. Drawing on the Dada principle that absurdity can be an appropriate response to feelings of alienation, McDermott seeks to solve her own specific struggles with socialization and work, through humor and over-engineering. </font></div><br><div style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px"><font size="2">In contrast to narratives of the future that are disproportionately focused on virtual bodies and bodies represented by data, McDermott’s inventions emphasize real-time physicality by deliberately intervening in physical space, to a ridiculous degree. She often creates electronics which can respond to sensors and environmental input, but that cannot be controlled by the wearer directly, complicating the agency of the human actors in the scene. Examples include a dress which creates a cloud of fog based on a reading of the wearer’s stress level, and a mechanical brooch that opens to reveal a cinnamon bun when the wearer begins to sweat. The items are worn publicly, either by McDermott or a proxy, and the documentation is edited into narrative videos and GIFs, taking cues from infomercials and advertisements. She then produces tutorials for technically recreating the works in the series, which she distributes online and through workshops.</font></div><div style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px"><font size="2"><br></font></div><div style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px"><a href="http://www.kthartic.com/" target="_blank"><font size="2" color="#1155CC">http://www.kthartic.com/</font></a><font size="2"><br></font></div><div style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px"><a href="https://urbanarmor.org/" target="_blank"><font color="#1155CC">https://urbanarmor.org/</font></a> <br></div></font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="2" color="#212121" face="times new roman, serif"><br></font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="2" color="#212121" face="times new roman, serif"><b>Week Two: Poetics and Play </b></font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="2" color="#212121" face="times new roman, serif">(October 8) <br></font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="2" color="#212121" face="times new roman, serif"><br></font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="2" color="#212121" face="times new roman, serif">Truong Tran <br></font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="2" color="#212121" face="times new roman, serif">Lynne Sachs <br></font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="2" color="#212121" face="times new roman, serif">Kenji Liu <br></font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="2" color="#212121" face="times new roman, serif"><br></font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="2" color="#212121" face="times new roman, serif"><b>Week Three: Queer Ethnography/Methods and Play </b></font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="2" color="#212121" face="times new roman, serif">(October 15) <br></font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="2" color="#212121" face="times new roman, serif"><br></font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="2" color="#212121" face="times new roman, serif">Kale B. Fajardo <br></font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="2" color="#212121" face="times new roman, serif">Erica Rand <br></font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="2" color="#212121" face="times new roman, serif">Jerry Zee <br></font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="2" color="#212121" face="times new roman, serif"><br></font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="2" color="#212121" face="times new roman, serif"><b>Week Four: Racial and Decolonial Practice and Play </b></font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="2" color="#212121" face="times new roman, serif">(October 22) <br></font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="2" color="#212121" face="times new roman, serif"><br></font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="2" color="#212121" face="times new roman, serif">Craig Santos Perez <br></font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="2" color="#212121" face="times new roman, serif">Maria de Los Angeles <br></font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0)"><font size="2" color="#212121" face="times new roman, serif">Gabriela Cordoba Vivas </font></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><font face="times new roman, serif"><br></font><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr"><font face="times new roman, serif">On Mon, Sep 30, 2019 at 10:51 PM Renate Ferro <<a href="mailto:rferro@cornell.edu">rferro@cornell.edu</a>> wrote:<br></font></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-style:solid;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><font face="times new roman, serif">----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------<br>
Dear -empyre- <br>
Welcome to October already. The leaves are falling here in Ithaca and the furnace is on. I am feeling the impending darkness of autumn creeping into my afternoon activities. I can only imagine the light where so many of you are. <br>
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We welcome a month of discussion on Practice and Play: Gestures Across Genres organized by Margaret Rhee to celebrate innovation in cross-disciplinary art making. Many of you will remember Margaret's discussion on Robot Poetics in May of 2017<br>
<a href="http://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2017-May/009683.html" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2017-May/009683.html</a><br>
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Margaret is an incredible poet, writer and artist. We are so lucky to have her on our -empyre- Editorial Advisory Board. She brings warmth to us from Buffalo, New York this month with her diverse set of guests. <br>
Her biography is below. Margaret will post the first post of the month tomorrow. <br>
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Welcome Margaret and thank you. We look forward. <br>
Renate<br>
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Margaret Rhee is a poet, scholar, and new media artist. She is the author of Love, Robot, named a 2017 Best Book of Poetry by Entropy Magazine and awarded a 2018 Elgin Award by the Science Fiction Poetry Association and the 2019 Best Book Award in Poetry by the Asian American Studies Association. Her poetry chapbooks include Yellow and Radio Heart; or, How Robots Fall Out of Love, and forthcoming collection Poetry Machines: A Letter to a Future Reader, a collection of lyrical essays on poetry, and the intersections of cinema, art, and new media. Currently, she is completing her monograph How We Became Human: Race, Robots, and the Asian American Body. She was a College Fellow in Digital Practice in the English Department at Harvard University and a member of MetaLab @ Harvard. She received her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in ethnic studies with a designated emphasis in new media studies. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Study at SUNY Buffalo and co-leads Palah 파랗 Light Studios, a creative space for poetry, participation, and pedagogy through technology.<br>
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Renate Ferro<br>
Visiting Associate Professor<br>
Director of Undergraduate Studies<br>
Department of Art<br>
Tjaden Hall 306<br>
<a href="mailto:rferro@cornell.edu" target="_blank">rferro@cornell.edu</a><br>
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empyre forum<br>
<a href="mailto:empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au" target="_blank">empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au</a><br>
<a href="http://empyre.library.cornell.edu" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://empyre.library.cornell.edu</a></font></blockquote></div><font face="times new roman, serif"><br clear="all"></font><div><font face="times new roman, serif"><br></font></div><font face="times new roman, serif">-- <br></font><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><font face="times new roman, serif"><br></font></div><div dir="ltr"><font face="times new roman, serif"><br></font></div><div dir="ltr"><font face="times new roman, serif"><br></font></div><div dir="ltr"><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0);margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px"><font face="times new roman, serif">Margaret Rhee, Ph.D. </font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0);margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px"><font face="times new roman, serif"><br></font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0);margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px"><font face="times new roman, serif">College Fellow in Digital Practice (2018 - 2019) </font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0);margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px"><font face="times new roman, serif">Department of English </font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0);margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px"><font face="times new roman, serif">Harvard University </font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0);margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px"><font face="times new roman, serif"><br></font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0);margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px"><font face="times new roman, serif">Assistant Professor in Media Theory (2019) </font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0);margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px"><font face="times new roman, serif">Department of Media Study </font></div><div style="color:rgb(0,0,0);margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px"><font face="times new roman, serif">SUNY Buffalo </font></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>