[-empyre-] Farewell to Bare LIfe
dear -empyreans-
Writing from the desert at Wendover, Utah, I 've been participating
in a very ad hoc GPS 'expo' with projects on the Bonneville Salt
Flats, planned with -empyre- contributor Brett Stalbaum. We've been
out in the salt for a couple of days (stinging eyes, searing heat,
brilliant whites). If it wasn't 'bare life' it was anyway sublime or
anyway sub-alkaline (or, below the salt). I've been a bit off line
(if not out of line...).
Leaving today to drive back to California, and since the Nevada
desert by car is not the best for internet connections, it's time to
bid farewell.
Last month, in June 2006, our guest Sergio Basbaum helped us
consider 'liquid narratives'. Recently in VIROSE (http://virose.pt)
Sergio also has referenced McLuhan's trope about media narcosis-----
"(...) The greek myth of Narcissus is directly concerned with the
fact of human experience, as the word Narcissus indicates. It is
from the the Greek world narcosis, or numbness. The youth Narcissus
mistook his own reflection for another person. This extension of
himself by mirror numbed his perceptions until he became the
servomechanism of his own extended or repeated image. The Nymph Eco
tried to win his love with fragments of his own speech, but in
vain. He was numb. He had adapted to his extension of himself and
had become a closed system.(...)" ( from Understanding Media)
Considering 'What is Bare LIfe?"' If there's anything the -empyre-
list contributors, guests and readers alike, have done, is to de-numb
Narcussus. To be, if even for a moment, in a space of raw speech,
inside 'bare life.' The list's work contributes substantively to
the concurrent conversation worldwide on "What is Bare Life?" in
collaboration with Documenta 12 Magazine Project.
The entire discussion is archived at https://mail.cofa.unsw.edu.au/
pipermail/empyre/2006-July/
There has been exceptional participation from list members including
Aliette Certhoux, Ana Valdes, Leafa/Olga, Bee Flowers, Tracey Benson,
Malik, Deborah Kelly, Dirk Vekemans, ecrudden, Gianni Wise, Greg
Smith, Jacky Sawatsky, Jacquie Clark, Jim Andrews, John Haber, Luigi
Pagliarini, Marc Garrett, Mendi Obadike, Nicholas Brown, Nicholas
Ruiz, Patrick LIchty, Ryan Griffis, and Sarah Kanouse. Thanks to
all who took time to read through the threads and communicate in our
empyrean 'soft-skinned-space'. I hope I've remembered everybody.
Special thanks go to our July 2006 guests on -empyre-, for the second
of three topics organized around leitmotifs with Documenta 12
Magazine Project. http://www.documenta12.de/english/magazines.html
Michelle White (US) ------------------------->Michele's new book,
"The Body and the Screen: Theories of Internet Spectatorship," is new
with MIT Press http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?
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. 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.
http://www.michelwhite.org.
Tina Gonsalves (AU)----------------------------> (http://
www.tinagonsalves.com) Tina's creative investigation integrates Art,
Science and Technology. For over a decade she has used video,
painting, animation and interactivity to explore complex emotional
landscapes. Rich, painterly video abstractions create emotionally
potent narratives that often seduce or repel the viewer. Converging
science and art, she attempts to enrich the public understanding of
the hidden emotional language of the body. Converging technology and
video, she creates embodied interactive audiovisual experiences,
discovering new ways of experiencing the internal body and the
external environments.
G. H. Hovagimyan (US)---------------------------> GH is an
experimental cross media, new media and performance artist who lives
and works in New York City. He is one of the first artists in New
York to start working in Internet Art, beginning in 1993, with such
artists' online groups as the thing, ArtNetWeb, and Rhizome.His new
work involves mash-ups online with new art dirt redux at http://
nujus.net/gh/ and http://post.thing.net/gh/
Conor McGarrigle (IR)----------------------------> is a net artist
based in Dublin. He is the founder of online arts space Stunned.org .
In 2002 as part of the Irish Museum of Modern art project he started
the net art open: the uncurated open submission net art show in which
all entries are accepted. His art has dealt with themes of
surveillance (Spook...) , identity (PLAY-lets) and art activism
(IrishMuseumofModernArt.com), often involving fictional identities
with an element of prankstavism never far away. He is currently
working on an extended narrative work about artists in Dublin based
on Joyce's Ulysses (Cyclops, Proteus episodes completed to date) and
has recently developed an interest in mapping resulting in Google
Bono : a google maps / surveillance camera mashup. http://
www.stunned.org/
Susana Mendes Silva (PT)--------------------------> lives and works
in Lisboa, Portugal. She has been working in the interstices of
intimacy and affection, but also with reflecting about the object of
art. Some of her projects make a very visible bridge between these
two universes, especially the site- specific or the performance
works. She contributes regularly to VIROSE as well, at http://virose.pt
She has recently shown the installation Mind Walls in a group show at
Museu da Cidade (Lisboa). In 2005 she presented the solo exhibitions
Words in my mind (where she presented a drawing installation at Casa
d'Os Dias da Água, Lisboa) and Life-cage (where she shown video and
photographs at Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art, Lisboa), and in 2006
Did I hurt you? (where she presented video and drawings at Zoom,
Galeria Carlos Carvalho Arte Contemporânea, Lisboa). Her video work
will be shown in Mostra de Vídeo Arte Portuguesa Contemporânea -
Antologia, Luanda, Angola in 2006. http://www.virose.pt/vector/b_16/
mendes_silva.html and http://www.susanamendessilva.com
Jordan Crandall
(US)-----------------------------------------------------> http://
jordancrandall.com Jordan is a media artist and theorist. His ongoing
art/research project, UNDERFIRE, concerning the organization and
representation of political violence, opens in October 2006 at the
Seville Biennial. He is currently completing HOMEFRONT, a new 3-
channel video installation that explores the effects of security
culture on subjectivity and identity. He is Associate Professor in
Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego.
For a forthcoming special locative media issue at VIROSE, http://
virose.pt/, Jordan has contributed an essay that relates directly
to his posts here in the past week, called "Precision+Guiding
+Seeing," originally published with CTheory in 2005. VIROSE is edited
by -empyrean- Miguel Leal, who has also included a conversation bare
life as a motif for site study on the mudslide-torn beach town of La
Conchita, California, with Amy Wiley and myself; and a third piece,
"The Rise of the 'Location-aware Generation,' by Ana Boa-Ventura.
The locative media issue should be online in August 2006.
Thanks again to everyone who has taken part whether silently or in
print on our list this month for the question "What is Bare LIfe?"
-cm
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" 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?"
-Documenta 12
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