Re: [-empyre-] Panic

[timothy murray <tcm1@cornell.edu>]

> Thanks, Brooke, for your provocative introduction.  I'm hoping we 
> might pursue a bit your distancing from the popularity of locative 
> media (which we've previously discussed in -empyre-) because of your 
> sense that it collapses terror technologies into infotainment 
> objects.  Something that Renate and I noticed at this summer's ISEA, 
> for instance, was a celebration of locative media projects but a 
> decrease in particularly political installations and projects, 
> particularly those critical of the military-industrial nexus 
> sustaining new media.  Even the project by Muntadas that situated 
> the locative in the cartographic context of the global 
> military-industrial complex was installed far off track in a 
> convention room hall, between hotels (something our 16 year-old 
> reminded us just the other day--the apparent politics of its 
> placement even caught his attention).


The most striking exception were bio projects by Natalie Jeremijenko, 
your collaborator Beatriz da Costa, and Paul Vanouse who will join us 
next week  whose overall impact was to challenge the infotainment 
that seemed to us to prevail in the main exhibits.  Of course, we 
share your concern that this isn't limited to the specific 
configuration of last year's ISEA.

When you joined us at Cornell last fall for the workshop, "Thinking 
the Surface," we engaged in somewhat of a similar debate with 
extremely smart and influential architects who seemed to be enchanted 
by the patterns and surfaces of technodesign.  One rising architect 
even presented his slick and stylistic surveillance environment 
through which stylish amoeba shaped cameras would track every move in 
an airport, with the emphasis on architectural pattern minus any 
critique of the underlying TechnoPanic of this project.

So your emphasis on this disparity strikes me as particularly 
important in these days of heightened emphasis on the technology of 
design.

Thanks.

Tim






>  > In the last several years I have seen the rise of work termed "Locative
> >  Media" and my own work is sometimes grouped in that category. I usually
> >  ignore labels but this one is particularly bothersome to me because there
> >  is
> >  a trend here to collapse this ever-growing field of terror technologies
> >  into
> >  infotainment objects. This gets to the issue of what Tim calls the
> >  "ambivalent attraction to technologies of terror" and, as Horit questions,
> >  "what is the relationship between the production of art by means of
>  > digital
> >  technologies and the production of terror by the same?" Locative Media (as
> >  with the term Web 2.0) is deceptive in its appearance of being simply
> >  shiny,
> >  fun and new. Yet, do we question computer art for its use of the digital
> >  computer, originally designed to quickly crunch numbers to project
> >  missiles
> >  more accurately -- wherein lies the difference? Is it only distance from
>  > inception?
> >
>  >

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