[-empyre-] -empyre- posting on TechnoPanic, forwarded from Horit Herman Peled

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

It seems that in post- 9/11 era we roam the ravages of the wistful 
pastoral global village. We can argue about toponymy. However, 
emergency laws are increasingly being implemented in order to prolong 
the ostensible chimera of security by hounding panic out of the good 
life. Is there a call in the sound of pounding drums, while 
accessorized digitality, gates, barriers and walls are expanding? 
Should we ask, first, what is the relationship between the production 
of art by means of digital technologies and the production of terror 
by the same means? Should we further interrogate the meaning of 
"terror"? Is terror exclusively a political act carried out by groups 
that operate illegally against an economic and political power and 
engage in violent action against innocent civilians? Or is terror 
also a reciprocal activity, a reaction against legal and 
institutional oppression perpetrated by economic and political 
powers? Digital technology is the quintessence of the latter kind of 
terror, state terror, as an instrument of surveillance and 
identification, construction, deconstruction and stripping of human 
life.

Walter Benjamin had argued that the reproductive capabilities of the 
photographic technologies severed the grounding of the artwork in 
both place and time, and reversed its "total function," to be based 
on politics. This logic applies even more strongly to the virtual, an 
environment where the means of producing, distributing, and viewing 
of cultural codes have condensed into a screen to be shared 
everywhere.
Does this historical-technological phenomenon call for greater 
responsibility on the part of artists who use this technology for the 
increasing numbers of people who live what Giorgio Agamben has 
characterized as "bare life"? Should artists, particularly those 
placed in the midst of terror, entrench themselves in virtuality, or 
should they venture into the forbidden zones inhabited by bare life?


Horit Herman Peled
horithp@gmail.com

http://www.horit.com

--
Renate Ferro & Tim Murray
-empyre- moderators