[-empyre-] August 2006 on -empyre- : peripatetic pacific

[Christina McPhee <christina112@earthlink.net>]

dear -empyreans-

We'd like to invite everyone into an open mike on Pacific Rim and new  
media practice, in terms of two metaphors,  'journey' and  
'bridges'.   At ISEA this year, there's a Pacific Rim New Media  
Summit  (PRNMS) going on August 7 and 8.   I'll be attending the  
summit at the invitation of the organizers, as a reporter for - 
empyre-.  It's my hope that I 'll be able to bring some guests from  
the summit into a more extensive discussion with our list subsequenty  
this month.

In keeping with our networked sense of community as soft-skinned  
space we 'd like to generate some discussion throughout the  non- 
summit  as it were-- the plains, oceans, valleys, cities of new media  
For this we're keying off of a provocative artists manifesto by  Raqs  
Media Collective (Delhi) (quoted from the recent  Place, Ground and  
Practice in Asia Pacific New Media Arts, December 2005, Auckland)    
http://culturalfutures.place.net.nz/  Raqs conceptualizes practice in  
terms of 'journey' and 'journeyman'.

> "The first imperative, that of crossing borders, translates as  
> scepticism of the rhetoric of bounded identities, and relates to  
> the role of the practitioner as a 'journeyman', as the peripatetic  
> who maps an alternative world by her journey through it. The  
> second, of building a shelter against the odds of the law, insists  
> however on a practice that is located in space, and rooted in  
> experience, that houses itself in a concrete 'somewhere' on its own  
> terms, not of the powers that govern spaces. It is this fragile  
> insistence on provisional stability, which allows for journeys to  
> be made to and from destinations, and for the mapping of routes  
> with resting places in between."
> -- Raqs Media Collective, 'X Notes on Practice'


It's also interesting to read of the hopes for the summit as a  
bridging mechanism  (quoted from the ISEA PRNMS  site http://01sj.org/ 
content/blogcategory/69/87/
> From the outset we thought of the Summit as a mechanism to  
> encourage and facilitate international cooperation with an eye to  
> sustainable relationships. Understandably this approach is not  
> without difficulties and, as desired, it has been an emergent  
> process rather than directorial.  We view the Summit as a point  
> along a trajectory of building ‘interpretive bridges’ that broaden  
> all of our capacities for creative and intellectual exchange.  By  
> focusing the Summit on sustainable ‘outcomes’ it is our objective  
> to facilitative cooperative agendas that enable creative  
> production, research and cultural/political practice that challenge  
> current models of cooperation.  The Summit is not an attempt to  
> simply become comfortable with one another or to suggest that  
> collaboration is not without controversy, dissent and  
> disagreement.  The Summit is also about the collisions of ideology  
> and manifesto.  It is about trying to work through the problematics  
> of diversity and difference.

Hope that this juxtaposition of two images is provocative especially  
in relationship to your experience and insights along the Pacific Rim .


all the best

cm






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