[-empyre-] 'bare life' in Technopanic

[timothy murray <tcm1@cornell.edu>]

> Thanks, Christina, for providing such a helpful background on the 
> recent -empyre- discussion of bare life.  Renate and I also were 
> extremely interested that Horit refers to this concept.  We don't 
> recall her discussing "bare life" during our visit this past fall 
> when she addressed my Cornell conference on "Thinking the Surface."

I'd be particularly interested to hear Horit elaborate on her 
understanding of the valence of this concept in relation to her own 
complex art projects, which I'm hoping she might now describe in more 
detail.

Her "Digital Terror" essay was part of a complex net.art piece on 
Palestinian worker transit into Israel, and the overdetermined 
digital surveillance and scrutiny to which these workers are 
subjected (overdetermined particularly in relation to her 
documentation of the "bare" fruits resulting from their labors and 
their passage).  Clearly at stake in her project is an articulation 
of the complex balance between terror and paranoia that fuels the 
cultural situation on which she comments and over which she 
frequently performs as an activist witness.

Renate and I are also interested in hearing this month from other 
-empyre- travellers whose particular socio-cultural-artistic 
circumstances result in similar or different responses to TechnoPanic.

Best,

Tim

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

office: 607-255-4086
e-mail: tcm1@cornell.edu