Re: [-empyre-] Bare Life, Ghost Detainees, Exclusion and Performance

Christina McPhee <christina112@earthlink.net> · Tue, 18 Jul 2006 11:56:14 -0700

On Jul 18, 2006, at 8:49 AM, Nicholas Ruiz wrote:
At any rate, the net is still somewhat available to bare lives that  
can

purchase access and manage to connect--our conversation is proof of

that--but then, this does not mean that we do not remain docile  
bodies, in

the Foucauldian sense, since the undecideable has been decided, for  
us.

I tend to have  a much less structural view (together with Conor) , I  
don't think that speech and power are completely

occluded, probably because I work from  imaginaries  of topologies in  
flow that might subvert or subtend the power relations of speech and  
bodies.
Tried to write about this in "Aphasia+ Parrhesia: Code and Speech in  
the Neural Topologies of the Net"

online in 2 versions
neural.it/english  2003  http://www.neural.it/english/ 
aphasiaparrhesia.htm
drunkenboat  http://www.drunkenboat.com/db7/index.html

Persistence of speech -- mass suffering still finds a catharsis  in  
new media and multimedia projects.  Take for example a new work in  
New York City, Jonathan Zalben's

WTC: a multimedia response to September 11, 2001.
Traumatic memory is characterized by delay.  The horror of what was  
experienced is shut inside a place in the spirit that intensely  
resists cognition.  It's not anyone's lack of caring

or fault that the traumatic event cannot be directly 'represented.'   
An absence exists at the core.  What Richard Rhodes named, in the  
book of the same name, "A Hole in the World."
An aesthetic strategy of displacement is possible (like a cover over  
a manhole, shifted to just one side, so you can see part way into the  
hole).   Using delay as a spatial  ( interactive video installation)  
displacement as well as a temporal (aural) fugue,  Jonathan begins  
with shatterings and re=formations from Bach's Well Tempered  
Clavier .   He writes,

WTC is a multimedia work in response to the terror attacks of  
September 11, 2001 on New York City. The piece is in two movements,  
one devoted to each tower that fell. Each movement is based on a  
piece from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. Recordings and transcripts  
of radio transmissions released by the FDNY on August 12, 2005 are  
layered into the original music score, consisting of strings and  
electronics.
As visitors walk through the space, their movements trigger  
excerpts of the radio transmissions, while transcripts are read  
over walkie-talkies by live performers. The walkie-talkies not only  
evoke the original sound of the radio transmissions, but they can  
pick up stray conversations on open frequencies in a two-mile range.
Video footage using images of the World Trade Center, is also  
projected in the space and responds to the audio through custom  
computer software. The colors vary with changes in the sound score,  
and a person’s movement can also trigger changes in the video, such  
as cueing new images.
In the center of the space are two columns of light which recall  
the memorial each year at the World Trade Center site. When a  
person enters the light, their image becomes an outline for an  
American flag revealed in the video projection. The movement  
captured in the light also serves as the focal point for triggering  
audio and video clips to be filtered through the computer.

-cm