Re: [-empyre-] Re: empyre Digest, Vol 29, Issue 9

[brooke singer <brooke@bsing.net>]

I am hard pressed to come up with any "ultimately neutral material reality"
and am also not a believer that one can just strip something of its cultural
connotations through sheer will. This is the traditional framework for
science and engineering, but not one I embrace or find particularly useful.
There are many ways to challenge, expose, invert, rewrite or customize our
technologies and I am very interested in all of them as political acts. I am
not saying all new media artists have to do so explicitly but these
directions (especially in relation to our present conditions and the future)
interest me most and that is where I find encouragement and inspiration. I
personally don't feel like I live in a time where I can just "get on with
it" and focus my energies on formal properties & new possibilities without
the serious consideration of my material realities.

On 4/13/07 2:22 PM, "Brett Stalbaum" <stalbaum@ucsd.edu> wrote:

> I agree with what Alan is saying - I'd condense it as technologies
> representing instantiations of ultimately neutral material realities,
> and while it can be a challenging sort of mental gymnastics for artists
> to strip these of their cultural connotations (which might be bound to
> their military origins or past applications, and which certainly
> deserves initial interrogation), it can also be useful for artists to
> move productively beyond the social and political critique of the
> technology and go onward to examine the formal properties and new
> possibilities for any new media. These too can be political, but more in
> the sense of creating new applications or configurations of practice
> than to reveal (or worse restate for too long, over and over) the
> political problematics implied by any technology's social past.
> 
> Brooke's point about locative media is a great one. Much of the
> potential of locative media has been lost in an exclusionary obsession
> with the social impact of the technology, the urban, surveillance,
> geo-annotation and mapping. The imaginary of the artist as want-to-be
> sociologist who is going to visualize our problems, behavior and expose
> the social potential of locative media has dominated the field, so I too
> worry about this, as these are the exact same approaches to the
> technology companies and government surveillance have taken. Probably it
> is time to see what else we can make locative media do that rewrites our
> assumptions. Formally or politically, this is a way out of the sociology
> rut.
>