Re: [-empyre-] clarifying noiseless challenge

["Timothy Conway Murray" <tcm1@cornell.edu>]

Thank you, Sergio, for framing the discussion in view of art's historical
relation to the technological.  As you suggest, another way of making the
distinction between the technical and the technological would be via
Heidegger's emphasis on techne as poiesis, as an opening up rather than a
closing down of the field of the technical.  His work on the technological
tended to express a prescient suspicion of scientific cultures of
"research" whose drive is reproduction of their own models and cultures
rather than open experimentation with and critique of the technical
(resulting, he suggests, in a loss of cultural erudition or of the
possibility of its flourishing outside the limitations of  techno-research
model).  Those of us writing from within the patronage of American
universities are fully sensitive to the increasing corporatization of the
research model and of its drive to envelope (and silence)
counterdiscourses emerging within the fluid fields of digital art and
culture.  Its almost as if the leaders of academic technobusiness are
being led by a complete misreading of Heidegger's essays on technology in
that they champion the capital of the technical over the thoughtfulness of
techne.

I agree enthusiastically with your call to reflect on interventionist art
as providing an ambitious antidote to this drive.  The critical delight
offered by much of the new media art discussed on -empyre- stands in
relation to its exploration of the thresholds and stains of technical
repetition with the aim of infusing those thresholds with the
unexpectedness of thought.

Thanks so much.

Tim