[-empyre-] Welcome to TechnoPanic: Terrors and Technologies

[Renate Ferro <rtf9@cornell.edu>, Timothy Murray <tcm1@cornell.edu>]

Hello, Everyone,

We are happy to introduce ourselves as a recent addition to the 
-empyre- moderating team by hosting the April discussion of 
"TechnoPanic: Terrors and Technologies."  We thought it might be 
productive to discuss how mobile and surveillance technologies serve 
as exciting platforms for artistic experimentation just as their 
manipulation by security interests instills fear and public panic. 
Over the month, our guests will reflect on how panic, paranoia, 
critical resistance to, and appropriation of technologies of terror 
are mediated by the threat and fear of violence in the interlinked 
networks of mobile media, domestic space, and the public sphere.   We 
also hope to consider how the ambivalent attraction to technologies 
of terror shifts registers between post-cold war and post 9-11 
sensibilities, whether from international or cross-generational zones 
of engagement.

 Our collaborative work and teaching have long been influenced by 
broad reflection on matters of trauma and terror, particularly as 
they intersect on the registers of memory, fantasy, technology, 
culture, and art.  Renate has created a series of interactive and 
electronic installations around the theme of "mining memory" (URL) 
These have ranged from the digital regeneration of 1950s family 
movies to public interaction with virtual archives whose 
representation of everyday objects (from books and records to dolls 
and skates) solicits the recording of personal narrative responses 
from viewers that are integrated into the installations.  This past 
week, she mounted an installation, "Panic Hits Home," for the Finger 
Lakes Environmental Film Festival at Ithaca College (New York) in 
response to the invitation of the Festival curators, Patricia 
Zimmermann and Tom Shevory, to create a piece that dialogues with the 
festival theme of "panic." The impetus of Panic Hits Home was 
inspired by Renate's childhood memories of her mother stockpiling 
food and water in their family's "fruit cellar" during the Cuban 
Missile Crisis and her own unexpected paranoia of the terror stemming 
from 9/11.   Playing on the retrospective confusions between trauma 
then and now, Panic Hits Home juxtaposes original sixties television 
footage and public service announcements promoting "duck and cover" 
and bomb-shelter protection with the high tech television and web 
directives of our contemporary Department of Homeland Security. Tim 
articulated some of these psychoanalytical parameters of TechnoPanic 
in his 1997 book, Drama Trauma, and since has penned texts, edited 
net.art exhibitions, and hosted conferences on "Digital Terror" for 
CTHEORY (www.ctheory.net), CTHEORY MULTIMEDIA 
(http://ctheorymultimedia.cornell.edu), low-fi.org (www.low-fi.org), 
and The Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art in the Cornell Library 
(http://goldsen.cornell.library.edu).  His sense of the cultural and 
artistic importance of TechnoPanic also is related to his work as 
Curator of the Goldsen Archive through which he has become 
particularly interested in the artistic responses to TechnoPanic and 
how artists have been "speaking back" to security interests by 
appropriating many of the same technologies for political and 
artistic action.

We are very pleased that a number of exciting artistic thinkers have 
accepted our invitation to join us as guests during the month. Horit 
Herman-Peled (IS) is a media artist, theorist, and feminist activist 
in Tel Aviv, who teaches art and digital culture at the Art 
Institute, Oranim College, Israel.  Horit's bold and brave artistic, 
feminist, and activist interventions at Palestinian checkpoints have 
framed her understanding of this conflict particularly in terms of 
"digital terror." Brooke Singer (US) is a Brooklyn-based digital 
media artist and arts organizer.  Brooke will discuss her activist 
work as a member of Preemptive Media and how her most recent 
collaborations, both as an artist and curator, utilize wireless 
(Wi-Fi, mobile phone cameras, RFID) as tools for initiating 
discussion and positive system failures.  She is Assistant Professor 
of New Media at SUNY Purchase.  Paul Vanouse (US) teaches in the Art 
Dept. at the University of Buffalo (SUNY). His artworks include data 
collection devices that include polling and categorization (for 
interactive cinema), genetic experiments that undermine scientific 
constructions of identity, and temporary organizations that 
performatively critique institutionalization and corporatization. 
Paul also has collaborated with Critical Art Ensemble, whose member, 
Steve Kurtz, has been pursued and prosecuted by American Homeland 
Security agents. Sean Cubitt (AU) will lend to the discussion his 
critical and theoretical expertise in media and communications, which 
he teaches at the University of Melbourne.  Among his numerous books 
on cinema and new media are EcoMedia, The Cinema Effect, and Digital 
Aesthetics.  Sean has curated numerous exhibitions and is Editor in 
Chief of the Leonardo Book Series for MIT Press.




--
Timothy Murray
Acting Director of The Society for the Humanities
Professsor of Comparative Literature and English
Director of Graduate Studies in Film and Video Studies
Curator, The Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Cornell Library
A. D. White House
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853