[-empyre-] november on Empyre

["sergio basbaum" <sbasbaum@gmail.com>]

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November 2006 on -empyre- soft-skinned space:


THE WORK OF ART IN THE AGE OF A NOISELESS WORLD

Please join Hamed Taheri (DE), Johannes Birringer (UK), Michelle
Kasprzak (UK), Maria Moreira (BR), and Miguel Leal (PT).

subscribe at


<http://www.subtle.net/empyre

Seventy years ago,  Walter Benjamin wrote his insightful essay on the
impact of technical reproducibility of art on the way we perceive,
receive and understand the concept of art in itself. Few articles have
had such a lasting impact on debates about the relations among
technology, art works, perception and culture as Benjamin's
masterpiece.

Trying to take advantage of some of Benjamin's insights, but assuming
we are now under a radically distinct social and cultural landscape,
-empyre- welcomes some guests' insights on "the work of art in the age
of a noiseless world", and the alternatives we may have for the work
of art as a practice of perceptual guerrila.

If we assume that technologies are - even if for war purposes, as most
of the digital apparatuses have been -, developed taking certain
notions of  a "better life" as its goals, they carry with them a
certain utopia, related to the knowledge matrix and values from which
they emerge: they
intend to help to build such a world. We ask if there is - and if so,
what it is - the utopia embedded on digital informational technology.
The cybernetic paradigm aims a world of perfect informational flux -
that is, a world without noise. We are faced with the puzzling paradox
that, in such a context, even a significant field of art-works and
art-activism developed as "social noise" are forced, in order to
circulate through digital networks, to formalize themselves in
noiseless terms - those demanded by digital apparatus.


Please join our guests for conversation on "the work of art in the age
of a noiseles world" at  http://www.subtle.net/empyre

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Hamed Taheri, born in 1975, in Iran, the son of the poor teacher and
radical leftist militant
Ahmad Taheri and the young woman MAMA who suffered from a neurotic
disease after the revolution in Iran.  He writes, "That devastating
spasm in he tongue, jaw, face and powerless doctors in the face of
this blocked mouth. Electro-shock therapy; She was on the
electro-shock chair, jolted by
the electric shocks, and screamed.  The mouth refused to open. There
are guests who enter through a door underneath this image as a
suspended sign that sways in the breeze, a door behind which I
practice my T H E A T R E."
http://www.wnmf2006.de/

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Johannes Birringer is a choreographer and artistic director of
AlienNation Co   (www.aliennationcompany.com), and co-founder of
atelematic performance collective (ADaPT).  He has directed numerous
multimedia theatre, dance, and digital performances;   collaborated
onsite-specific installations, and exhibited work at film and video
festivals. Author of
Media and Performance (1998), Performance on theEdge (2000),  Dance
Technologies (2007). Founder of Interaktionslabor
(http://interaktionslabor.de), and co-director of DAP-Lab, Brunel
University,  where he is Professor of Performance Technologies.
http://www.aliennationcompany.com/people/jobi.htm

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Maria Moreira is a visual artist from Rio de Janeiro, working with
ideas of non-oppositional conflict and parallel competence.  She has
an MA Fine Arts Goldsmith College, and in 2004 completed a PhD at
Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, researching on
installation
art as a mode of address that articulates tactics of dispersal to
investigate the world as multiplicity. She exhibits since late 80's
and since 2004 she is an Associated Lecturer to The University of the
Arts London and Thames Valley University, Reading, in UK, and now to
Universidade Candido Mendes, in Brazil.

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Michelle Kasprzak  is a curator, writer and artist. Her work in these
three areas
has featured in numerous exhibitions, publications, and on radio and
television broadcasts syndicated worldwide. She actively maintains her
web presence at michelle.kasprzak.ca/blog and www.curating.info. She
is currently Programmes Director of New Media Scotland.
(www.mediascot.org).
http://michelle.kasprzak.ca/blog

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Miguel Leal (1967) works and lives in Porto, Portugal. Visual Artist.
Graduated in Visual Arts - Painting at ESBAP, Porto (1991); Master
degree in History ofArt from FLUP, Porto. (1999). He is currently
working on his PhD thesis, investigating chance operations and blind
imagination on contemporary art practice.  Develops, since 1997,
several ongoing collaborative web projects. Founder (1997) and
co-director of Virose, an interdisciplinary non-profit organization
dedicated to art and media technology (www.virose.pt). Assistant
professor at FBAUP (www.fba.up.pt), teaching studio and contemporary
art classes.
http://virose.pt

Sergio R. Basbaum (moderator)