[-empyre-] Introductions and beginnings (October on -empyre-)

[Ryan Griffis <ryan.griffis@gmail.com>]

Thanks, Tracey for the introduction, and deGeuzen as well for the  
invitation to participate in the discussion this month.

There are a couple of challenges looming, at least for me, that i  
feel compelled to address, but certainly have no answers for. i will  
just state them here, then present the context of the Under Fire show  
that was mentioned by Tracey in the introductions, in which deGeuzen  
presented some of their recent work.

Challenge one: the post-critical/projective/utopian realism - this  
set of ideas has been most articulated in discussions of  
architecture, but a primary point of reference is the work of Bruno  
Latour, who is becoming a popular reference in a lot of discussions.  
To (over) simplify the point, this challenge asks if critical theory,  
in its dominant form, hasn't outlived its context. Not just a post- 
Marxist position, the goals of those making the challenge don't seem  
different from those employing "historical" critical theory, but the  
question is whether or not the target of critique has shifted and  
requires new tools and methods to engage it, and might possibly  
require a form of positivism/pragmatism.
see:
http://tloguser.totalcare.nl/tlog_projective.pl? 
owner=projectivelandsc&filter=39
http://www.ensmp.fr/%7Elatour/articles/article/089.html

Challenge two: the continued analysis of Brian Holmes, regarding  
practice and theory in our current realities. To quote the end of a  
recent post by Holmes' to the iDC list:
"The moment of believing you could "get there first" and determine  
the destiny of a new technological phylum by sheer force of  
enthusiasm has been gone since the tech bubble burst and the corps  
started demanding hard returns on their investment. Nowadays, doing  
anything real means accepting a minority, undergound status and all  
the undertainties of working without any clear support or public. The  
elected representatives of a democratic country just voted to fuck  
off the Geneva convention. At the very best, the post-critical future  
is a name for a contemporary utopia."
See the whole post and following thread here: http:// 
mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2006-September/000816.html

So, to get to the context of the Under Fire exhibition in Chicago,  
and deGeuzen's contribution to it:
deGeuzen's (with Tsila Hassine) "Global Anxiety Monitor" and  
"Historiographic Tracer" ( http://www.geuzen.org/underfire.html )  
both represent an instance of research (in the general sense of  
collecting/analyzing data) and symbolic framing. In this sense, it  
contributes to the project of "tactical media" (if anyone's still  
using that term) by assuming the role of a "tool" for engaging/ 
studying a given situation as well as consciously politicizing the  
data and its means of collection (the tool itself). In many ways,  
these projects, and much, if not all, of deGeuzen's work also builds  
on the practices and theories of people like Martha Rosler and Alan  
Sekula who practice a "critical documentary" in which the potential  
for affect provided by photography is neither abandoned nor  
surrendered to, but engaged to find those instances where desires to  
represent and change reality can be made politically reflexive.
In this light, i found the work of deGeuzen presenting some ways of  
navigating (addressing positively) the previously mentioned  
challenges, along with the work of other included artists like Trevor  
Paglen, Mariam Ghani + xurban_collective.
i would also like to point people to a short essay written for the  
exhibition by Dan S. Wang, which presents perhaps, a third challenge  
regarding notions of "commitment."
http://www.art.uiuc.edu/projects/underfire/#essay
Without framing any direct questions, i hope that this provides at  
least some defined space to start with -- and i know that deGeuzen  
will have some provocations of their own. i also know that my own US- 
centric bias is ever present in these discussions, so i hope others  
will reveal those limitations and expand on them.
i look forward to the exchanges.
best,
ryan