[-empyre-] translations

[ryan griffis <grifray@yahoo.com>]

Thanks for calling my use of "we" out Diana -- i certainly didn't catch 
it. (original quote from me below)
"the audience is one predicated on a certain distance - a mediated 
distance - from the site of supposed contact. we can fall for the 
cybracero hoax because we're already so disconnected from the realities 
of food production (and by direct connection, the physical sites of 
production). but it reveals that distance (between audience and 
site/prodcution) once it's revealed as a hoax - which depends on the 
practice of a media bound by principles of fact checking and 'truth.'"
but i don't mean to imply that it's a "gimmick" in the pejorative, or 
that it's about being "taken in" per se. but i do think that the 
audience that is mostly targeted by Cybracero is a demographic 
distanced from industrial food production - which is neither wholly 
determined by nationality, ethnicity or class (though there are certain 
unarguable correlations, especially regarding the Cybracero work). just 
as the Yes Men's recycled hamburger hoax was not directed at their 
supposed "clients" - the recipients of US food aid - it was directed at 
business school college students.
of course, i'm following the path of least resistance and not 
critically engaging these practices from other subject positions. which 
is problematic, indeed. but i don't think it's excluding the 
possibility of other engagements even if it is short sighted and narrow 
as a reading.
and i find Danny's statement also compelling when considering inSite 
and discussions of class:
"So it is not supposing that the typically bourgeois new media curator 
can necessarily have a conversation with the typically working-class 
modified car enthusiast, but that by bringing the very different 
consciousnesses together the outline of the gaps between them can be 
traced, and the aesthetic question in this kind of "gap" is also, 
somehow, what contemporary art is all about."
but i also think the collapsing of "class" across other concerns may be 
a reductive flattening... not because class isn't a useful and 
necessary construct in understanding how the economy structures 
communities, but that those communities and their relationship to 
economics may shift in ways not theorized. the tracing of the outlines 
(figure/ground) is a nice visual...
best,
ryan

On Sep 19, 2005, at 9:00 PM, empyre-request@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au 
wrote:

> To jump over to a comment that I think Ryan posted about the Cybracero
> work - it was something along the lines of "we can all be taken in by 
> this
> gimmick". This is something I'd take issue with, because I'm not at all
> sure about the assumption behind that we. It sounded a bit like all 
> work
> on the net would be read from a white perspective - (please forgive me 
> if
> I'm reading this incorrectly) - in spite of the dominant demographics,
> this excludes the possibility that that work could or would be 
> accessed by
> an audience that would have an entirely different reading of it.