[-empyre-] politics of critical fusion

[Timothy Murray <tcm1@cornell.edu>]

Forwarded from "norie neumark" <norie.neumark@uts.edu.au>

Hello,
Before responding to Saul, I'd like to introduce myself. (Sorry, I've 
just caught up with September's really interesting works and 
discussion) I am a sound and media artist (what Steve Dietz calls 
'formerly new media artist")  and academic and I work in 
collaboration with Maria Miranda. Most recently we've been making 
works which involve performative encounters in public places. (for 
instance, collecting the world's biggest collection of breath, which 
we will use to blow back global warming) Because we make them in 
public places, they are perhaps in one way political, though we 
don't  think of it as "political art" because we don't see our 
project as either reform or revolution or even exposing society's 
ills. [Interesting here could be the discussion about politically 
motivated social collaborations not so much from a political point of 
view (is it just reform) but an aesthetic point of view  by Claire 
Bishop in "The Social Turn: Collaboraton and its Discontents" http://
www.artforum.com/html/issues/200602/new]

We are working with the element of play outside of the formal 
structure of games (and this harks back to earlier discussions this 
month), which enables us to invite others to enter a zone of 
performative encounters with us and allows for a moment of sociality 
with strangers. That is, we're interested in encounters at this level 
of the momentary and everyday. There is for us an element of a sort 
of self-reflexivity because the media we use to document the 
encounters is what actually makes the encounters possible (it 
becomes, playfully, a documenting of a documenting...)

Norie Neumark
Media Arts
Humanities
University of Technology, Sydney
  www.out-of-sync.com
--
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