Re: [-empyre-] Farewell to Bare LIfe

Aliette <aliette@criticalsecret.org> · Sun, 30 Jul 2006 23:05:57 +0200

Dear Christina,

Have a good and splendid drive back to Santa Barbara!

Was a very hard thematic regarding the geopolitics more the local and the
global situations;-)

Once more receive my congratulations,

Aliette

On 30/07/06 20:05, "Christina McPhee" <christina112@earthlink.net> probably
wrote:

> 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
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> ---------------------------------------------
> " 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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> _______________________________________________
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> 