Re: [-empyre-] unstable perspectives

["Melinda Rackham" <melinda@unsw.edu.au>]

priamo wrote:
> I am well aware that every context has hurdles and I
> guess what I want to put on the table is this
> situation in which art practice is (apparently) at the
> service of official cultural politics.

norie wrote:
> Space was an interesting part of the mix. Not just being in two places
> which most web savvies are used to. The space in the room created
> various challenges. ...

the space thing is interresting. as someone who guinea pigged to do a guest
lecture i found it to be quiet spatially destabiling as i felt like i was in
the middle of an arena.. when uselay doing a lecture /workshop thing is a
frontal experience.. it seemd like i had  a room fulll of people in front of
me in sydney, and as i could hear the sound from ithica projected on the
screen behind me it seemed like room full of people behind me  which sort of
triggered some sort of flight fight response in me.
 i was aware that there were two seaprate parts of the group and i felt like
i had my back to one ..but in their visual reality they could see my front
but not my visuals, and  whom i turned away from to speak to.. as from my
perspective they were visually and sonicaly behind me..

any way what i'm trying to say was that the perspective of space and
position was very physically altered by the projection arrangement, and
although im sure with time it would have become familiar.  i found it a
little bit  panoptical and it challenged my own mode of opeartaing in a
space and with other people.  i actually went away and thought about it
quiet a lot as i work with Vr stuff and the dominance of frontal visual
perspective.
 it reminded me of a work i tried in japan last year..(sorry i forget who
did it) where you are in a soft round space, thre are two players, each puts
on a featherd costume with head set and back pack . you cant actually see or
hear except through your head set, and the visuals from one person's
perspective are fed into the oterh persons visor -- so you see thru someone
else eyes.  the object is to find each other.. i thought it would be
simple.. but it was really bloody confusing.. and i had an allergic reaction
to tthe fibres of the feathered costume so i was crying while i was
wandering lost in the arena... cut off from my nice stable western visual
life-line

one of the great things was always supposed to be that art gave us alternate
perspectives.. but it seem like they have to be pretty jolting today to
actually move us..i am crying at the tv images of war,, but i know they are
also sanctioned filtered media images as well..

media is by definition mediated... to take further what Priamo was saying, i
actually think  all art , where ever  it is located is mediated by some sort
of official cultural politics.. (what about the very active zappatista net
network in mexico which exist without official sanction?)  what net art
students are shown in universities goes thru the filter of what thier
lecturers think is appropriate or relavent..i know of one lecturer  (since
retired) who thought that what was relavent content to show media students
where the sites linked from shockwave.com!!!  every one  has thier adgenda
whether it be cyberfeminism,   neo-retrocodeism  or biofuturism..  what we
see on the net goes thru a filter of google search engine which is fast
becoming a dangerous monolith.. or through rhizome net.art site of the day..
official cultural politics has many faces..

every curator has thier cultural adgenda to push.. most media work doesnt
get shown in mainstream  australian galleries  because a lot of the curators
with "position" and are very filmic and are looking for seamless aesthetcis
which speak the language of cinema . not the language of the net..
yet they woudl think they are very open and informed as to contemporary
practice...and would see cultural politics as something soemone else
enforces.

cultural politics includes those who  get government funding to do or work
on projects..and who gets sponsorship and who gets comissions..so any one
who has ever been paid for thier work form some other entity  is part of
that cultural machinary.. anyone who make s anything is also part of it..
you dont exist outside your relations with your environment..

..its really all about perspective..
and the oppositional us v' them doenst seem to work well in any space.. i
guess inclusion of perspectives is what i want to be  aiming for.

 i t