[-empyre-] Critical Spatial Practice on -empyre-

[renate ferro <rtf9@cornell.edu>, timothy murray <tcm1@cornell.edu>]

-empyre Introduction
September 1, 2007

	As an artist, my interest in hypothetical  boundaries or the 
space between interior/ exterior, psychic/social, and private/public 
has created interesting confusions in working with the immaterial of 
new media. Combining and connecting the analog world, the physical 
space of the exhibition site with the digital forges and pulses or 
pauses, allows the participant to maneuver through the installation 
space to contemplate, reflect and formulate new discourses.  
	In a recent installation commissioned by Women Direct for the 
Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, my installation was layered 
beneath Ithaca College's cavernous rotunda area nestled beneath the 
stacks of the library.  This architectural space became a sheltered 
psycho-space which "housed" the series of videotaped interviews of 
cross-generational subjects who revealed stories about their personal 
responses to panic and trauma.  The installation became a catalyst 
for the confusing inter-mix of fright and anxiety both present and 
past.  The viewer's body traversed the material space to discover 
digital realms of vision and narration that uncovered the layers of 
the dialectical paradigms that these personal accounts revealed 
whether they were repressed memories or fleeting recent recollections.
	Simultaneously viewers could hear faculty and students whose 
daily chatter filled the reverberating airwaves above as they climbed 
the open stairway that architecturally surrounded the rotunda space. 
These casual passers were similarly able to observe the intimate 
revelations below the surface, initiating an unanticipated, if not 
critical, spatial interaction.
	Welcome to our -empyre discussion of CRITICAL SPACIAL 
PRACTICE.  We our looking forward to including artists, architects, 
and theorists in this discussion linking the practical with the 
theoretical. 

Renate Ferro


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