[-empyre-] Re: pedagogy and curating

[Christina McPhee <christina112@earthlink.net>]

Dear Tim, Patrick and empyre,

As the hours pass agonizingly slowly towards the nightmare of tomorrow it is
difficult to summon speech; one is almost rendered silent by the enormity of
the hypermedia circus that has brought all of our fears of digital terror
into reality.

Tim and Patrick have asked for others to comment with experience of
curatorial projects involving pedagogy.


As personal engagement in the themes of trauma and terror grew into a series
of net art meditations on speech among the enslaved, using the metaphor of
the cyborg, I gradually got very pulled into the desire to create media
installations that might generate an atmosphere of strangeness, allure, and
invitation, conducive to a hoped for awakening to the presence of
hypermedia, something that, surprisingly, is so much 'background noise' that
my students don¹t even react to it as a separate reality. Not to influence
what they think about globalism, digital terror, and hypermedia but just to
bring it into view.  To awaken minds from the condition of amnesia and
anaesthesia that are a response to terror conditions.  The NAXSMash projects
have been a tiny step in this direction.  Three projects in the past year,
on as many phenomenological levels as possible tried to create generative
conditions for students to improvise a space slashed, or smashed by virtual
and hyperreal conditions.

In each case there seemed to be a potency in the process of letting others
improvise spatial (de)construction (stretch, hang, project through, touch)
with hands on use of  the premade digital transparent prints.

It was  producing the physical manifestations of netbased work and
manipulating these prints as if it were still in the realm of net work (as
in, transformation, mutation, transference, instability, ephemera).


 cm 


Christina McPhee
<http://www.christinamcphee.net>
<http://www.naxsmash.net>