[-empyre-] Border Crossings - Transgressions- from Kate Southwell

["Melinda Rackham" <melinda@subtle.net>]

Hello  All

A huge thanks to Christina, and to -empyre- for generously
making a space to consider and discuss aspects of border
crossings and matrix theory and their potential significance
to new media artists.

As Patrick and I began to consider the theme of border
crossings and Matrix Theory for this month's -empyre- we
began to open up issues relating to our collaborative
processes that we hadn't explored in such great detail
before.  Here was yet another example of the difference
between 'knowing' something intuitively and being able to
articulate that knowledge to our conscious selves and
others.  Why is it so difficult to bring emotional or
intuitive knowledge into the realm of the symbolic, of
language?

Although in our work Patrick and I use different conceptual
and theoretical tools to each other, I think we are asking
very similar questions.  So, for example, Patrick doesn't
particularly use Matrix Theory, nor even a psychoanalytic
methodology, preferring a Dialectical Materialist framework.
However, we are both interested in asking whether it is
possible to live and make artwork within an aesthetic and
ethical space that is resistant (even temporarily) to
commodification and colonisation.  Is it possible and
desirable to attempt to ethically and aesthetically
transgress the border between art and capitalism?  Would
such a transgression be qualitatively different to
art/capitalism border crossings currently being attempted
within new media art?

I believe that the work of Bracha L. Ettinger, proposes an
understanding of border crossings, transgressions,
encounters and intimate sharing that has resonance for many
of us within new media communities.  In the course of this
month's -empyre - discussions I would like to try and
understand more fully the ways in which Bracha's work might
be relevant to new media, and the ways in which her
proposals differ from others we may be more familiar with.

Bracha L. Ettinger was able to begin theorising what she has
termed 'Matrixial Borderspace' through her own artistic
practice, and she has been developing and honing these ideas
now for several years.  Her work is complex and open to
misunderstandings.  I am only beginning to know her work,
and therefore should like to stress at the beginning of
these discussions on -empyre- that I am not an expert.  But,
from the first time that I read one of her posts (via
Christina McPhee) to Jordan Crandall's Underfire project I
knew that she was articulating 'something' that was
immediately recognisable to me at an intuitive and emotional
level.  On those first few readings of her post I didn't
particularly understand her actual words, but I had an
overwhelming sense that she was accessing a psychic space
that I 'knew' but that up until this point had always
existed as an ungraspable shadow.

I suppose the shock for me was that this psychic space - a
feminine space - is routinely denied - in life and in art,
and even in new media art.  As I get to know her work a
little bit more, I am beginning to understand the extent to
which the (albeit fluid) frameworks within which new media
art exists can only ever approximate what I and others are
trying to reach in artworking and in living.

Through the processes of making art, and the processes of
encountering my own artwork and others' artwork, I'm
interested in finding ways of exposing and transgressing the
border between what I (in relation to others) experience and
my ability to articulate that experience to myself and
others.


Kate