Re: [-empyre-] PRNMS

[timothy murray <tcm1@cornell.edu>]

> At ISEA, I delivered a presentation in the Pacific Rim section but 
> was unable to participate in the Summit preceding ISEA as an invited 
> observer.

I am disappointed to learn that the poetic style of Raqs' language 
was critiqued for lacking "political content" at a Festival dedicated 
to the electronic ARTS.  Is it possible that "poetic" language opens 
up an undetermined space for the political that may have been 
deadened by preconceived notions of recognizability or consensus? 
Are we confident that we can determine what such "political content" 
is?  Does it exclude poetic and artistic form?  Are we so ready to 
give up on artistic experimentation as a process of pushing the 
boundaries of how we understand the political? If so, there might not 
be so many reasons for the ISEA to continue to exist in its present 
form.

This does not mean that I wasn't concerned by the relative uniformity 
of the "content" of much of the artwork on display in the giant 
bubble.  I, too, noticed a surprising quietude on the part of 
selected artists given the depth of overtly political issues 
confronting our community: from the war and electronic militiary 
apparati to issues surrounding "digital terror" and politicized 
borders, to hunger and reproductive rights, etc.  Although there were 
many pieces that made gestures to the weighty issues, the overall 
tendency of the curatorial vision, which seemed to emphasis "data" 
collection and projection, tended in my mind to dull the ideological 
verve of the EA in the perhaps more recognizable guise of sociology, 
its particular artistic style, and its derivatives (I even think that 
my own informational presentation of the Chinese archival holdings 
was guilty of favoring information over ideological content). 
Nothing wrong at all with that--there were some tremendous works. 
Of course, there was also a great variety and amount of work spread 
all over San Jose, much of it both poetic and political, but the work 
under the bubble did seem to reflect somewhat of a common gesture to 
precisely the kind of recognizability for which Raqs seems to have 
been critiqued.   I was struck, for instance, that the piece by 
Muntadas on information systems and interfaces, which he presents 
with a visually "poetic" interface, found itself exhibited in the 
isolation of the far wing of the Convention Center where ISEA was not 
meeting (I never asked him about the reason for this positioning and 
wondered if it could have been linked to what appeared to be a 
convention on search systems that seemed to end the day ISEA began?).

What's particularly troubling me, however, is less the curatorial 
vision than apparent association of poetic style with apolitical or 
elitist content.  Doesn't this delimit the poetic's possibility of 
extending boundaries, of pushing limits, and of confronting us with 
articulations previously unspoken?  It was in this context that 
Jean-Francois Lyotard, one of France's most political philosophers, 
frequently stated that form itself is the most political of 
constructs.

When Arthur and Marilouise Kroker and I worked together on the design 
of the common interfaces linking the internet artworks on CTHEORY 
MULTIMEDIA, grouped around paradigms of genomic, terror, sound, etc., 
we worked to develop more of an artistic and poetic interface than a 
more obviously information friendly one. While recognizing that this 
could alienate some users, our hope was it would encourage them to 
participate in the poetic openness and interfaces of the many 
ideological edgy artworks we presented.  Of course, the style of our 
curatorial essays, some presented via multimedia, also shares this 
commitment to the political verve of style.  For me, this is one of 
the things that distinguishes the ISEA community from its peers in IT.

Hope this helps further catalyze the discussion, now that we all seem 
to be crawling back from the reserves of vacation.

Tim


--
Timothy Murray
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
Director of Graduate Studies in Comparative Literature
Director of Graduate Studies in Film and Video
Curator, The Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Cornell Library
Co-Curator, CTHEORY Multimedia: http://ctheorymultimedia.cornell.edu
285 Goldwin Smith Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York  14853

office: 607-255-4012
e-mail: tcm1@cornell.edu