<div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small">Thanks to Renate and Tim for inviting me to be part of this week's discussion. I can think of few other people on this little blue planet who would have the reach, depth, and insight to bring people from all known continents for this cross disciplinary exchange of ideas, perspectives, and experiences. <br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small">I will be brief since I must enter the disembodied Zoom world of no one's choosing shortly in order to engage 3 classes and 75 students. My course is called Critical Health Issues. No, I did not make up that title over the past month. I've been teaching the course for almost 40 years. Of course, there have always been critical health issues. As many contributors pointed over the past few weeks, the personal, public, political, artistic, and social cross paths and challenge us all as we face an event that epidemiologists have been predicting for decades. This week, my class is scheduled to discuss mental health issues, which have been and will be a long lasting side effect of the Covid invasion. Today, the class breaks out into small groups to share thoughts and questions about <i>Darkness Visible</i>, William Styron's illuminating essay on depression, including his own. I'll be reporting on those conversations and look forward to our own conversations over the next week. <br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small">-Stewart<br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:small">PS: Renate mentioned in her intro that the guests this week are "friends who we have met over much of the world at some point in time." Full disclosure: I live in Ithaca, NY just a few miles down the road from her and Tim. I can't wait till the time I can hug them both. <br></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Thu, Apr 16, 2020 at 3:48 AM Shu Lea Cheang <<a href="mailto:shulea@earthlink.net">shulea@earthlink.net</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------<br>
a shout out to Renate and Tim for bringing together these much needed <br>
discussions. RESPECT.<br>
<br>
enlightened by week2, viral +border.<br>
<br>
good to meet the week3. and Arthur Kroker! who helped me to migrate to <br>
the cyberspace in the 90s amidst the data trash, "smelling the virtual <br>
flowers and counting the road-kill on the digital super highway"... I <br>
did take the first exit driving on the super highway.<br>
<br>
sl<br>
<br>
my brief bio reads " From homesteading cyberspace in the 90s to her <br>
current retreat to post-netcrash BioNet zone, Cheang takes on viral <br>
love, bio hack in her current cycle of works."<br>
<br>
<br>
On 16.04.20 05:28, Renate Ferro wrote:<br>
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------<br>
> Welcome to Week 3 on -empyre- we welcome our friends, Stewart Auyash, Maurice Benayoun, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Arthur Kroker, Premesh Lalu, Sooyon Lee, Dingquan Xie. Each of these guests (as are most of our guests this month) are special friends who we have met over much of the world at some point in time. The global representation we have this month is really astounding to me and we all look forward to hearing about your perspectives, experiences, and expertise.<br>
> <br>
> We continue to be thankful to this platform for bringing us together virtually in such an overwhelming time.<br>
> Renate<br>
><br>
> Week 3 Guest's Biographies<br>
><br>
> Stewart Auyash is Chair and Associate Professor in the Department of Health Promotion and Physical Education at Ithaca College. He studies and teaches public health policy, public health communication, and media representations of public health. He has written and spoken about his observations and experiences living in Singapore during the SARS epidemic. In his spare time while teaching online during the pandemic, he is revisiting the numerous books and articles that forewarned about a catastrophic global public health event and why so few paid attention.<br>
><br>
> Maurice Benayoun-Artist, theorist and curator, based in Paris and Hong Kong, Maurice Benayoun (MoBen, 莫奔) is a pioneering and prominent figure in the field of New Media Art. MoBen’s work freely explores media boundaries; from virtual reality to large-scale public art installations, on a socio-political perspective. Maurice Benayoun’s work has been widely awarded (Golden Nica Ars Electronica 1998 and more than 25 international awards) and exhibited in major international museums (2 solo shows at Centre Pompidou Paris), biennials and festivals in 26 different countries. Some of MoBen’s major artworks include The Tunnel under the Atlantic (VR, 1995), World Skin a Photo Safari in the Land of War (VR, 1997), the Mechanics of Emotions (2005-2014), and Cosmopolis (VR, 2005). Elaborating on the concept of Critical Fusion applied to art in physical or virtual public space, Maurice Benayoun initiated the Open Sky Project on the ICC Tower Hong Kong media façade.<br>
><br>
> With the Brain Factory and Value of Values, in the framework of Mindspaces collaborative research from Horizon2020, Starts Lighthouse EU program, he is now focusing on the morphogenesis of thought, between neuro-design and crypto currency, values and money.<br>
><br>
> With a PhD in Art and Art Sciences, MoBen taught from 1984 new media art practice and theory at Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne and Paris 8 University. He was Professor and artist in residence at the French National School of Fine Arts (ENSBA). Since 2012, Maurice Benayoun is full Professor at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong.<br>
><br>
> Bishnupriya Ghosh teaches global media studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. After the monographs, When Borne Across (2004) and Global Icons (2011), which theorize cultures of globalization, she has turned to media and risk in the co-edited The Routledge Companion to Media and Risk (Routledge 2020) and The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media (work in progress).<br>
><br>
> Arthur Kroker is Canada Research Chair in Technology, Culture and Theory, Professor of Political Science, and the Director of the Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture at the University of Victoria. From his research for a new book project, “I Stepped into the Future and it Wasn’t There,” to his ongoing studies of technology and society, Arthur Kroker writes the digital future. Here, some of the key psychic symptomologies and political consequences of the present pandemic have been rehearsed in his collaborative work, “Panic Encyclopedia.” The fears and anxieties surrounding Covid-19 have been anticipated, in bodily detail and in social definition, in his book, “Body Invaders” written in collaboration with Marilouise Kroker. And what better describes the panic hysteria of the Trump administration in the face of uncontrolled viral contagion and a society dissolving under the weight of evidence-based risk of infection than “The Hysterical Male,” another of his collaborative writing projects.<br>
><br>
> Could the present pandemic be an transition point, quickly transiting us to a new future based on the collapse of the social; the devolution of politics into continuing states of emergency; the shedding of labor in favor of the triumph of virtual capitalism; and the resurgence of the new ethical values of social distancing, tracking, monitoring and self-isolation? Like one of those violent spring winds that sweep away the lingering debris of the winter past, Covid-19 may also have its political consequences, namely shaking up the old structure of society to reveal what lays just beneath—the very real politics of viral contagion.<br>
><br>
> Premesh Lalu is former director of the Centre for Humanities Research, and Principle Investigator of the DST-NRF Flagship on Critical Thought in African Humanities, at the University of the Western Cape (<a href="http://www.chrflagship.uwc.ac.za/" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://www.chrflagship.uwc.ac.za/</a>).<br>
> Lalu has published widely in academic journals on historical discourse and the Humanities in Africa and is a regular contributor of public opinion pieces on the arts and humanities. His articles have appeared in History and Theory, Journal of Southern African Studies, Critical Times, Kronos: Southern African Histories, Economic and Political Weekly and the South African Historical Journal. His book, The Deaths of Hintsa: Post-apartheid South Africa and the Shape of Recurring Pasts (2009) was included in the Alan Paton longlist in 2010. In it, Lalu argues for a postcolonial critique of apartheid that will foster a concept of post-apartheid freedom. He is also co-editor of Remains of the Social: Desiring the Post-apartheid (Wits University Press, 2017). His short film, Looking for Ned, was screened at the Encounters Documentary film festival in Cape Town in 2018. Currently, he working on a monograph titled The Techne of Trickery: Race and its Uncanny Returns and a feature-length documentary titled The Long Silence that deals with cinematic memory of apartheid.<br>
> Sooyon Lee is a Ph.D. Student in the Dep. Of the History of Art and Visual Studies, Cornell University and Associate Media Curator, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea. Her research focuses on visual languages implemented by digital/electronic media in East Asian contemporary art engaged with socio-political changes in 1990s and 2000s. Interested in the conditions of the society that artists reside in and how introduction of new media facilitates the generation of new visual languages in the globalized context. Dissertation topic explores Korean contemporary art scene from late 1990s to early 2000s pursuing the development of three key concepts in new media art specifically in response to Korean modern (art) history; cyberspace and minjung misul, digital materiality and Dansaekhwa movement, and the condition of postmodern represented in new media art.<br>
><br>
> She received BA in Linguistics and MA in art history from Seoul National University, Korea. From 2008 to 2015, as a media curator at National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea(MMCA), organized numeral media exhibitions including; Out of the Silent Planet(2010) first media collection show in MMCA, Public Project Cheonggye(2011), Art of Communication: Anri Sala, Yang Ah Ham, Philippe Parreno, Jorge Pardo(2011), performance exhibition with Hayward Gallery in London Move(2012) and 3-year Germany-Korea Museum Project Korea-NRW International Art and Artists Exchange Program (2013).<br>
><br>
> Dingquan Xie is a lecturer of Chinese contemporary art in the Department of Chinese Painting at Jiangxi Normal University. He is also a contemporary artist in China. He is interested in using the transformations of traditional Chinese images to reflect on various problems and phenomena in contemporary Chinese society. His recent large-scale work, The Other Shore (2015) uses the back images of Chinese Taoist gods to reflect on the current belief system in China. He can be reached at <a href="mailto:DingquanXie@163.com" target="_blank">DingquanXie@163.com</a>.<br>
><br>
><br>
> 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>
> <br>
> <br>
><br>
> _______________________________________________<br>
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