Re: [-empyre-] re Norie's posting

[timothy murray <tcm1@cornell.edu>]

> Thank you for your posting, Norie.  I seem to remember that the 
> first time I experienced the disembodiment of being registered by a 
> surveillance traffic camera was in Sydney while we were crossing a 
> street going about the banality of everyday affairs, the sort of 
> digital registration whose stakes are raised so tremendously high by 
> Horit's work and postings.
>
> It's so important, Horit, how your postings and work engage us in 
> contemplation of the contradictory nexus in which we all operate. 
> Many of us in American universities find that our involvement in 
> political and preemptive new media is so frequently offset by the 
> technostructure out of which we work, where politicized experiments 
> in new media are only barely endorsed by University structures more 
> keen on gathering up the extravagant research funds available for 
> national security projects.  At a recent address on our campus, one 
> of our highest university officers foregrounded experimental work 
> being done in visual imaging by referencing the advanced work being 
> done in surveillance coding and robotics for security interests.

> Although we shouldn't be naive about the paradoxes of our research 
> collaborations with colleagues who are outfitted with the highest 
> tech labs, it does seem like light years back when those of us in 
> university in the 60s were organizing and demonstrating against the 
> prevalence of Department of Defense contracts in physics and related 
> disciplines (our university's physics building still bears a the 
> plaque proudly thanking the Department of Defense for its 
> patronage).  I wonder what's become of similar resistance to 
> Homeland Security patronage on university campuses?  It certainly 
> isn't particularly loud.

Have we been hoodwinked into being embarrassed by its opposition? 
Are we concerned about insulting those whose personal losses from 
9/11 and other events might seem to warrant the rampant increase in 
tracking technologies and our cultural will to give into them?

> This is the realm of technopanic in which many of us teach and all 
> of us think.

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