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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:14.0pt">Hello everyone. It’s strange to watch the sun shining on the bucolic setting in which we are sheltering at home while health and economic darkness looms over the world. In planning this -empyre- month on
“Interfacing COVID-19: </span><span style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:-webkit-standard;color:black">the technologies of contagion, risk, and contamination,” Renate, Junting, and I were able to cull a broadly interdisciplinary and international set of guests
who have been working for many years on various aspects of risk and contamination as thought through the arts and digital culture. We want to thank all of our guests who have been willing to put aside their various responsibilities, professional and familial,
to join in this month-long call and response to COVID-19. Our hope is, indeed, to lean on our incredible community of artists, writers, and practitioners to bring some warmth into our world as we think through the moment, its challenges and whatever might
end up as its short and long term results.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:-webkit-standard;color:black"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:-webkit-standard;color:black">Like many of you, I’ve found my own projects thrown into suspension over the past month or so. Many of our invited guests this month were hit with the realities of
suspension and threat much, much earlier in the year. Weirdly, I’ve spent the past many months planning the 2020 Cornell Biennial around the theme of “Swarm: Ecology, Digitality, Sociality,” whose artistic environments are meant to provide conversation about
multitude, motion, sound, migration, and threat, while reflecting on precarity in an age of technological abundance. Meant to roll out over the course of the next six months beginning next week, the Biennial was planned to open next week with installation
of the “Tree of 40 Fruits” by artist Sam Van Aken. This spectacular tree was grafted by Sam to bear forty different historical varieties of stone fruits – a project of biological technicity that exemplifies the ecological productivity and longevity of swarm
while also providing a timely bouquet of flowers to attract Cornell University’s swarms of research bees. Not only is Cornell now closed, but the artwork itself ends up being locked behind the closed gates of nearby Syracuse University thus prohibiting Sam
from access to his work which has been featured at global ecological and economic events, most recently in Davos, where it stood as an exemplar of new green interfaces of art, biology, and economy. As my team has faced the sudden suspension of Swarm by the
virus, we have been most troubled by the Trump government’s confused and cruel delay of response while it has strategically and cynically moved forward daily, during the same time period, with rollbacks of American regulations and laws enacted to protect the
vulnerable environment. As we necessarily concentrate on the interfaces of contagion and contamination, Trump and his cronies profit from the public distraction of human suffering to sneakily enhance ecological degradation for the profit of global corporate
capital. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:-webkit-standard;color:black"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:-webkit-standard;color:black">The sad reality is that once this COVID-19 is nipped in the bud, the world will be facing an ever greater disparity of wealth on the backs of both the underprivileged
and the vulnerable environment – a combination for continual risk and contagion. This is a contamination, helas, that seems to know no bounds.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:-webkit-standard;color:black"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:-webkit-standard;color:black">At least it is consoling to know that we will be thinking all of this together on -empyre- throughout the month via the mediations of art and digital culture. Thanks
for being with us, and feel free to join in call and response.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:-webkit-standard;color:black"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:-webkit-standard;color:black">Hugs,<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:-webkit-standard;color:black"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:-webkit-standard;color:black">Tim<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Timothy Murray<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Director, Cornell Council for the Arts and Curator, Cornell Biennial<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">http://cca.cornell.edu<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><a href="http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu/"><span style="color:#0563C1">http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu</span></a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Professor of Comparative Literature and English<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">B-1 West Sibley Hall<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Cornell University<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Ithaca, New York 14853<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
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