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<p class="gmail-p1" style="margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:18px;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue"">Hi Elia,</p>
<p class="gmail-p2" style="margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:18px;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue";min-height:22px"><br></p>
<p class="gmail-p1" style="margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:18px;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue"">Thank you so much for your spirited response.<span class="gmail-Apple-converted-space"> </span></p>
<p class="gmail-p2" style="margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:18px;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue";min-height:22px"><br></p>
<p class="gmail-p1" style="margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:18px;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue"">I think it’s useful to shift the focus, as you suggest, from representation to performativity.<span class="gmail-Apple-converted-space"> </span>The quote by Shebaka Hutchings is really useful: "communities that have agency are able to form their own philosophical structures.” Also, a quote from your email - “We—whoever that is—don't need Utopia, we need ongoing practices that mutually enact a different world in its together ongoingness.” All of the projects featured this month enact and perform new, imaginative forms of community and collaboration, rather than represent their possibility.</p>
<p class="gmail-p2" style="margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:18px;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue";min-height:22px"><br></p>
<p class="gmail-p1" style="margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:18px;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue"">I’ll reframe my question into an observation — The thing that excites me about the particular artists and projects that presented this month is just how tightly they integrate each component of the month’s theme: intersections between networked collaboration, distributed storytelling and digital community building. For these projects, participants write, record, categorize and stream to each other, and work together, to compose and recompose the connections between each contribution. Imaginative forms of narrative, community and storytelling emerge all at once in these acts of collaboration. And as you say, philosophical structures and ethical systems for how technology structures this emergence.</p>
<p class="gmail-p2" style="margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:18px;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue";min-height:22px"><br></p>
<p class="gmail-p1" style="margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:18px;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue"">I’ve also been thinking about Octavia Butler this month, particularly Kindred and Parable of the Sower. In these novels, as I’m sure many empyre readers are familiar, the protagonists exhibit, or are subject to paranormal forces and abilities — unpredictable time travel from the contemporary (the 1970s) to the Antebellum South, and hyperempathy, or “sharing” of others pain in a future age of societal and environmental collapse (incidentally, the 2020s). In both stories, through experimentation, experience and often vulnerability, the characters slowly<span class="gmail-Apple-converted-space"> </span>gain agency in relation to the racial, environmental and economic injustices that they face. Maybe it’s interesting to look artists’ projects that explore and create their own politics of community, collaboration and storytelling, in relation to these characters’ journeys.</p>
<p class="gmail-p2" style="margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:18px;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue";min-height:22px"><br></p>
<p class="gmail-p1" style="margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:18px;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue"">dan</p></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Tue, Dec 22, 2020 at 12:58 AM Elia Vargas <<a href="mailto:elia.christian.vargas@gmail.com">elia.christian.vargas@gmail.com</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"><div dir="ltr">Hi Dan,<div><br></div><div>I think it is interesting to try to account for such broad potential, wide-reaching outcomes, through specific trajectories. By that I mean, your question takes on a really enormous scope in tackling Utopianism. I like when practices lead topics, rather than siloing interrelated ideas to maintain disciplinary continuity. Cultural practices, media practices, naturecultural practices, etc. might not be about a Utopian vision, but the work they do might collectively point towards some ongoing becoming of self-actualization. I'm actually not that interested in Utopia though. To me, the Utopian impulse is interesting as a kind of cultural artifact—it exists, and what does that mean?—but obviously, the legacy of utopian thinking, as it is articulated in English, since the enlightenment, is an incomplete vision, not only in its exclusion of certain humans and its tendency towards monoculture, but also in its conception of space/time/individualisms, one might even say it is the colonization of perfection. As a person who has lived in such utopian facing punk houses, coops, squats, etc., each of which has its own variant of investment or rejection of these ideas—the sort of spaces that much of the video art, conceptual art, avant-garde that you speak to emerged from—I'm certainly as invested as the next person in radical life experimentation, but I'd like to put more faith perhaps in Octavia Butler's religion of Earth Seed: God is change. But actually, I'd rather get rid of the still present metaphysics of individualism that Butler's God carries (or is maybe just a crucial part of all of Butler's stories) and so I'll arrive at Karen Barad's critique of the metaphysics of individualism by rejecting representationalism in favor of performative becomings. We—whoever that is—don't need Utopia, we need ongoing practices that mutually enact a different world in its together ongoingness; we need different measurement concepts of space/time/matter; different measurement concepts of self/other, human/nonhuman, nature/culture; different measurement concepts of measurement concepts.</div><div><br></div><div>Digital Humanities and Library Sciences researcher Bethany Nowvitski has an interesting article titled, "Speculative Collections" in which she quotes jazz musician Shebaka Hutchings: "communities that have agency are able to form their own philosophical structures." This is a quote to live by. Practices make new concepts possible. Indeed, they are not separate from each other and there is no final arrival when practices and concepts are finished. What I'm getting at here is that the vision lies in the doing, that ever so important verb shift to the present progressive, the performativity of being. Communities that have agency world their own worlds and that is emancipatory in itself. I would like to know these worlds. Who wouldn't? And in case my excitement is misread as a utopian-like optimism, I think it is deeply important to recognize that these differences mean exactly the death of the kind of monoculture that utopic communities often require as cultural capital: everyone who cites the same manifesto knows the passcode to get into the party. Isabel Stenger's idea of cosmopolitics feels really useful to me here: interests in common which are not the same interests. I'm certainly talking about more than just human relations, but participating in—dare I say actualizing—different worlds is not necessarily a comfortable practice. Oxygen is a life-enabling infrastructure for humans, it is a hostile toxic atmosphere for mitochondria. While I lived in northern Ghana, I attended a World Radio Day conference put on by Farm Radio, an international NGO. It was interesting to observe a sort of tribal fascism that emerged by the specific tribes utilizing the media network. Having access to radio transmission became a way for tribal values to be socially enforced and rigidly upheld by the chief: such as homophobic family values that differentiated social belonging. This was occurring on the backdrop of the 2019 World Radio Day's themes of Dialogue, Tolerance, and Peace. </div><div><br></div><div>My point is that communities' philosophical structures are not always, and not often, going to be the same interests, but that shouldn't stymie the practices of self-determination. It should not even be a component of the measurement system. There are differences; life forms. Technological practices, and by that I mean practices that are conventionally understood to occur with what is conventionally understood as technology, such as the internet, are no different. One must be attentive in the way a tool wields, includes, and excludes power. One must be attentive to the capacity for an environment to actualize certain things over others. Zoom is an enormously limiting platform but also, the privacy concerns surrounding it have been well documented by institutions such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation. This comes as no surprise. What is less obvious though is the ease with which we—myself and probably most of you—let Zoom determine our sense of expressive communication. We know it causes screen fatigue in myriad ways, we know that psychologically and neurologically our bodies use an embodied approach to absorb (if that is even the right metaphor) information in social interactions, yet we still generally conceptualize the idea of telepresent communication as one that has only marginally changed since the invention of electricity and the telephone (see Carolin Marvin's excellent "When Old Technologies Were New"). </div><div><br></div><div>What I hope for is that these practices of networked community enact new concepts of mutual actualization that can rework or reworld practices for the future.</div><div><br></div><div>in light,</div><div>elia.</div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Mon, Dec 21, 2020 at 11:18 AM Daniel Lichtman <<a href="mailto:danielp73@gmail.com" target="_blank">danielp73@gmail.com</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"><div dir="ltr">Hi Elia, as well as Angeliki, Cristina, Oscar, Simon, Matt, Sophia, Benjamin, Rowan, Sameen, Philip, Lee, Char, Maximillian, Sophie and Sasha,<br><br>As a way of beginning to wrap up this month’s program, here is a question to Elia, and all of the other artists who participated in Accumulations (<a href="http://accumulations.online/exhibition.html" target="_blank">http://accumulations.online/exhibition.html</a>). I think everyone on the empyre list is well aware of the myriad catastrophes—pandemic, assault on democracy, environmental crisis, racial injustice, to name a few—that we face today.<br><br>The pandemic has obviously generated a lot interest in networked structures for collaboration and community building. Accumulations has presented a number of projects that take digital interfaces, networking protocols and systems for organizing information as a starting point for reimagining what it means to commune, socialize and make art together today. All of these projects locate their new visions for creative community in the decentralized operation of producing, collecting and arranging fragments of audio-visual-textual material. I am drawn to the new visual, literary and auditory forms that they produce.<br><br>One broad topic that I am interested in, but conflicted about, and perhaps useful to end up on this month: do these projects propose a Utopian vision for the future of networked community and collaboration? Especially as contestations to capitalist forms of social organization and big-tech surveillance and profiteering. The hopeful way that these projects make innovative formal use of digital tools reminds me of the Utopian impulses that I see in avant-grades of the past—for example in the creation of Modern, individual painterly style in European abstract painting of the early 20th century, in contestation of art historical convention. Or in the formal experimentation with video technology in video art of the 70s and 80s, contesting the hegemony of mass media production. Or net.art of the 90s that remixed the possibilities of hypertext, HTML and early CSS. In each of these art historical moments, artists responded to historical and political imperatives by developing whole new modes and techniques of production.<br><br>Where or how do the projects presented this month point us in the way of the future of community and collaboration? When/if the pandemic subsides, will the new, networked forms of working and being together brought to the fore by social isolation challenge the status quo of how artists live, work and socialize together? What does this mean for wider populations of people and communities who are not directly involved in the arts?<br><br>These are broad questions. To all the artists, I invite you to respond to any aspects that seem to resonate with you or your project. Or if you disagree with any of my characterizations, please share that with us too! Feel free to respond briefly and/or informally.<br><br>I also invite anyone from the Empyre list to chime-in here, in response to the presented projects, these questions, or anything else that is of concern to you in relation to this month’s topic.<br><br>Looking forward!<br><br>Dan<br></div>
</blockquote></div><br clear="all"><div><br></div>-- <br><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><font face="arial narrow, sans-serif">Elia Vargas<br></font><div><a href="http://www.eliavargas.com" target="_blank"><font face="arial narrow, sans-serif">www.eliavargas.com</font></a></div><div><font face="arial narrow, sans-serif"><a href="http://www.livingroomlightexchange.com" target="_blank">www.livingroomlightexchange.com</a> </font></div><div><font face="arial narrow, sans-serif"><br></font></div><div><font face="arial narrow, sans-serif"><font color="#666666"><i>-Leonardo/MIT Press:</i></font> <a href="https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/leon_a_01978" target="_blank"><i>Crude Illumination: A Crude Oil Art Inspection</i></a></font></div><div><i style="color:rgb(136,136,136);font-family:"arial narrow",sans-serif">-LRLX Publication 5: Rare Earth: The Ground Is Not Digital available</i><span style="color:rgb(136,136,136);font-family:"arial narrow",sans-serif"> </span><a href="https://lrlx.square.site/product/preorder-publication-5-rare-earth-the-ground-is-not-digital/10?cs=true" target="_blank">HERE</a><br></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>
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