[-empyre-] July 2006 on -empyre- : "Bare Life"

[Christina McPhee <christina112@earthlink.net>]

dear -empyreans-

Thanks to everyone who has participated in "Liquid Narratives,' to  
the guests and Marcus Bastos (BR) http://pfebril.net, Sao Paulo based  
moderator, for imagining it and carrying it out.  Our guests for  
"LIquid Narratives' werew Jim Barrett (AU) http:// 
www.soulsphincter.blogspot.com/ ,  Lúcia Santaella (BR) (http:// 
www.pucsp.br/~lbraga), Sergio Roclaw Basbaum (BR) , (http:// 
www.globalstrike.net),
Carlos Falci (BR) (http:/www.cce.ufsc.br/~nupill) and Dene Grigar  
(US), http://www.nouspace.net/dene/


This month we are returning to the Documenta Magazine Project  http:// 
www.documenta12.de/english/magazines.html , in which we're  
collaborating with Documenta to generate a discussion around a theme  
Documenta calls "bare life'..

Background:  the editors of Documenta Magazine project approached us  
last year to integrate a series of three questions into this year's  
programming (2006), with an eye towards publishing some of our  
conversation in 2007 in connection with the launch of Documenta 12 ,  
in Kassel, Germany.   It's been a pleasure to already launch one such  
conversation, "Is Modernity our Antiquity?" in March 2006.  https:// 
mail.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2006-March

This month marks our second collaboration with Documenta.

Posts from readers, especially the quiet ones, are most welcome.  If  
you want to post in a language other than English, please feel free  
to do so, if it's a language we can decode to some extent in Google!
We hope to publish print versions of these conversations with  
Documenta, depending on the wishes and outlook of the Documenta  
Magazine editorial team.


The increased intensity of global communication and simultaneity  
makes the challenge of trying to 'be' an individual subject --  
whatever that is--- continually more complex and overwhelming.  - 
empyre-, if not implicated in this process, is still in the midst of  
it and perhaps may be, as our founder  Melinda Rackham has called  
it , our 'soft-skinned space',  a space of resistance as well,  in  
that we can hope to generate -- on the fly--- a contemporary art and  
new media ethics in a public space we create for ourselves and  
others.  In the March 2006 discussion, a lot of people were talking  
about an N space, past modernity and post modernity.  Maybe that's  
where we're at now?  In the N-space, bare life.

The second question or 'leitmotif' of Documenta 12 is described this  
way:


" What is bare life?
This second question underscores the sheer vulnerability and complete  
exposure of being. Bare life deals with that part of our existence  
from which no measure of security will ever protect us. But as in  
sexuality, absolute exposure is intricately connected with infinite  
pleasure. There is an apocalyptic and obviously political dimension  
to bare life (brought out by torture and the concentration camp).  
There is, however, also a lyrical or even ecstatic dimension to it –  
a freedom for new and unexpected possibilities (in human relations as  
well as in our relationship to nature or, more generally, the world  
in which we live). Here and there, art dissolves the radical  
separation between painful subjection and joyous liberation. But what  
does that mean for its audiences?"


A group of amazing artists and theorists, from Australia,  Ireland,  
the US, and Portugal, have conspired to join us and to think about  
this question of 'bare life'.


-empyre- will  introduce them one at a time, as each have differing  
gifts and perspectives.  Gradually over the coming days all their  
voices will make a polyphony with yours, if the -empyrean- space  
still works.


Our first guest is Michele White, of New Orleans, Louisiana, a  
witness to Katrina, and a noted scholar whose new book, "The Body and  
the Screen: Theories of Internet Spectatorship," is new with MIT  
Press  http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp? 
ttype=2&tid=10922

 Michele White is an Assistant Professor in the Department of  
Communication at Tulane University. She teaches Internet and new  
media studies, television and film theory, art history and  
contemporary visual culture, science fiction and technology  
literature, gender and queer theory, and critical race and  
postcolonial studies. She has a background in both visual production  
and theory.

Her published articles include: "Where Do You Want to Sit Today?  
Computer Programmers' Static Bodies and Disability" Information,  
Communication and Society 9, 3 (2006); "My Queer eBay: 'Gay Interest'  
Photographic Images and the Visual Culture of Buying," in Everyday  
eBay: Culture, Collecting, and Desire, ed. Ken Hillis, Michael Petit,  
and Nathan Scott Epley. New York: Routledge Press, 2006; "Too Close  
to See: Men, Women, and Webcams," New Media & Society 5, 1 (2003);  
"The Aesthetic of Failure: Net Art Gone Wrong," Angelaki: Journal of  
Theoretical Humanities 7, 1 (2002); "Representations or People,"  
Ethics and Information Technology 4, 3 (2002); "Where Is the Louvre,"  
Space and Culture – The Journal 4/5 (2000); and "Visual Pleasure in  
Textual Places: Gazing in Multi-User Object-Oriented Worlds,"  
Information, Communication, and Society 2 (1999).

Her book, which is entitled The Body and the Screen: Theories of  
Internet Spectatorship, was just published by MIT Press. In this text  
she considers how spectatorial positions are produced and structured  
through such practices as interface design, digital imaging, net art,  
and sitting. Internet sites and computer interfaces address the  
spectator, depict the kinds of bodies that are expected to engage,  
model the views and experiences that can be accessed, and promise  
spectatorial control for some individuals. In The Body and the  
Screen, White poses hybrid critical models and suggests how theories  
of art viewing, authorship, feminist and psychoanalytic film, gender  
and queer studies, hypertext, photographic reproductions, television,  
and postcolonial and critical race studies offer ways to understand  
Internet sites and spectatorship. The critical models indicated in  
this book are intended to support ongoing new media research and  
production strategies.

Her current research includes two book projects: Buy It Now: Lessons  
from Imaging eBay and Elements of the Internet: Rethinking the  
Network and Information Technology Workers. More information is  
available at http://www.michelwhite.org.


Please welcome Michele and join us for 'bare life'


-cm