Re: [-empyre-] Re DARPA URBAN CHALLENGE

[Timothy Murray <tcm1@cornell.edu>]

> Brian,

Actually, Brian, what intrigued me about Kevin's project of inserting 
new media art onto flatscreens initially envisioned for advertising 
and academic announcements was precisely what you term its 
"non--instrumentalized openness" in an environment for which 
utilitarian delivery may be of importance.

What I enjoyed about his project in the Computer Science building at 
Illinois was precisely, as he puts, that " It just never made sense, 
it got turned off repeatedly by viewers and just didn't fit in." 
Such a gap in sense or fit provided Kevin's curatorial project with a 
"non-instrumentalized openness" in a instrumental place.  Perhaps it 
was engagement with art itself which didn't fit here, or an 
indifference to it, or even a resistance to it (it got turned off 
repeatedly).

  I also saw this project at the time that Kevin was involved in the 
Illinois exhibition, "Balance and Power: Performance and Surveillance 
in Video Art."  So my appreciation was clearly influenced by the 
paradox of  artworks which were critically reflexive of surveillance 
appearing on screens in the very building in which informatic systems 
of surveillance could be at home.  So here, we have it, I was 
intrigued by the uncanniness (un/heimlich) of it all!

Tim



--
Timothy Murray
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
Director of Graduate Studies in Film and Video Studies
Curator, The Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Cornell Library
285 Goldwin Smith Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853