[-empyre-] cross-posting between -empyre- and iDC

[Renate Ferro]

>John,

It's generally not the policy of -empyre- to encourage double 
postings on different lists.  Since we try to encourage direct 
contextual responses to the ongoing dialogue on -empyre-, we would 
have encouraged Patrick to post something a little more -empyre- 
specific had his contribution not slipped through our software.

But we don't share your frustration about parallel subjects being 
covered between iDC and -empyre-.  It's funny, but when we moderated 
the topic of Critical Spatial Practice in September, we also 
discovered that iDC had launched a somewhat parallel topic.   Indeed, 
that topic was so parallel that we called -empyre-'s attention to it. 
As with this month when we received Scott Kildall's announcement that 
iDC would be discussing "On Media and Memory," ,it turned out that 
both discussions were quite different in conceptual emphasis and 
content, while still contributing to each other across the wires. 
Celebrating the cross-overs between our lists, we this accident or 
parallel themes  to reflect the healthy situation that -empyre-'s 
topic of the month, Memory Loss in the Technosphere: Art, Accident, 
Archive, has touched a chord that has broad resonance across the 
digital community.  And whereas  iDC is focusing on "the effects of 
the recent  blurring between media producion and consumption," ouor 
guests have been asked to generate a discussion of "how the tenuous 
memory reserves of digital representation reinvest the complex affect 
of the personal in thefragile fabrics of the social.  They will 
ponder the inscription of the cultural importance of memory and 
archive in the inherentmasochism of their fragility when art enters 
into contact with archive and accident."  The difference in concept 
and detail between these two discussions has been fascinating for us 
to follow.

This being said, we're extremely interested in how you discuss 
stepping out of the artistic event (when memory of the photograph 
contrasts with photographing the event itself).  This is precisely an 
area of the kind of slippage we foresaw in formulating this month's 
topic.   Renate has been experimenting with such slippage in her 
installations by moving between various archival platforms to raise 
questions pertaining to memory and archive  (Super 8, video, sound, 
television, etc.) whose intersection foregrounds both memory loss and 
the accident of new discursive events.  Tim has been writing about 
the event itself, as a psycho-philosophical horizon that is 
inscribed, as he mentioned last night, in the ongoing retrospectives 
of the "future perfect."  So we both find ourselves wondering whether 
the ongoing intersection of art-accident-archive doesn't constitute 
the ongoing openness of the event itself, rather than, as you say, 
"another process entirely (with the event 'playing in the 
background)."  While your distinction seems to situate the act of 
photography in something of an ontological bubble in which photograph 
marks its moment in the past (what Barthes called it's ca a  (we may 
be putting words into your mouth here, for which we apologize), we 
consider the interactivity of the creative process and its ongoing 
reception to extend the horizons of the artwork into the openness of 
the future.  We'd love to discuss this further through the rest of 
the month.

Best,

Renate and Tim
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