[-empyre-] Forward from Tim Murray - Virtual space and thanks/farewell

[Christina McPhee <christina112@earthlink.net>]

Hi, Christina,
I don't have the empyre address on this machine; could you please post this
for me?  Thanks.  Tim

Dear Emypreans,

It's fitting now on the last day of March that Ithaca received a new snow
cover of some 6 inches last night.  Although winter doesn't want to end, my
time as guest host is now up.  I want to thank you all for participating in
the unusually various ways we've communicated over the course of this
difficult and troubling month.

I especially want to thank Priamo and Norie for focusing their attention on
the issues of curating at just the moment when they might have felt
compelled to remain loudly in theie respective Mexico and Sydney streets.
The diversity represented by their participation is representative of the
strength and vision of their curatorial and pedagogical missions.

In response to Melinda's account of her experience in our classroom, I've
been meaning to say a few words about issues of virtual space and proximity
that could be as fitting for considerations of technowar as for thoughts
about curating on uneven ground.  Afer Norie and I spent a few weeks meeting
with our classes through the materialized mediation of the screen, we all
began to appreciate what it might be to be spatially realigned. While Norie
mentioned that physical space was important to our project (where chairs
were placed in relation to cameras), our project, as have my many curatorial
projects, also encouraged me to think about the realignments of my sense of
space occasioned by my curatorial work.  I often considered how close we
were to Lacan's notion of the "screen" as the representational engine of the
meeting of subjective gaze and social look, where the independence of the
subjective producer merges with the collectivity of the public user.  We so
frequently saw ourselves looking at ourselves via this jointly shared screen
(that maintained adjacent windows of both class sites at all times) that the
distinction between speaker and listener melted down in uncannny ways.  What
was curious was how this very disembodiment of discrete subject positions
ended up enhancing the collective will of the digital community.  We began
thinking through the screen and reflecting on our inscription in the
mechanics or apparatus of the screen--in much more complicated ways that
ever has happened in my cinema or video classes.

Perhaps the most telling feature, in view of our current global crisis, is
how we began the term with Jordan Crandall's CTHEORY essay, "Anything that
Moves: Armed Vision" (http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=115) and
ended the term by returning to it in order to reflect on how we had
participated in something of the uplifting version of scanned space he
discusses as potentially derivative from the military-industrial apparatus
of scanning.  We found ourselves willingly participating, as I frequently
find myself in new media exhibitions, in an "in-between" state of
spatialization where I am obliged to give up the primacy of my space and
speaking "position" in order to join in with an emergent collectivity I've
yet to understand.  This is something, helas, that the US-British alliance
cannot grasp as they wage a digitally dominant was in Iraq.

As we saw during our Empyrean moments of "no business as usual" this month,
the boundaries of this collectivity cannot easily be preconceived or
pre"launched" in preemptive strikes that will easily reorder space as we
imagine it.  Recall how different Priamo's sense of material and cultural
patronage is in Mexico City from what Christiane experiences in New York
City. The lesson that Norie and I learned from "joining" with our students
from two cultures, which re-marked themselves as being extremely different
in crucial ways, is that our digital space, the space of the conjoined
screen, prompted both of us to reevaluate our assumptions not only about
academic performance but also about curatorial display and analysis.

I think I can speak for all three of us, Norie, Priamo, and me, in saying
that this digital space is not utopic, in our minds, but something more akin
what is lent by the "rub" of something akin, say, to Lyotard's notion of the
differend, as that tension or tensor in new technology whose yet to be
articulated promise s rise to the articulation of more creative difference
more than a return to a deadly military-industrial technical same.

In thanking you for your participation this month, if only by lurking (what
we all know to be a useful and productive activity in itself), I look
forward to discussions that will follow in what we hope can be much more
peaceful times.

Tim
Timothy Murray
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
Director of Graduate Studies in Film and Video
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Cornell Library
285 Goldwin Smith Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853
607-255-4012

Co-Curator, CTHEORY Multimedia: http://ctheorymultimedia.cornell.edu/