[-empyre-] empyre: wired sustainability continued

[Dale Hudson]

Thanks, Renate and Tim, for the invitation to participate in the forum.  Thanks, Patty and Tom, for the invitation to co-curate with Sharon an online exhibition for FLEFF again this year.  And thanks, everyone, for your posts this month.  Very interesting threads and links to imaginative and provocative work!

I thought it might be useful to expand upon some of what Sharon has mentioned in terms of the questions that we asked ourselves in relation to curating an online exhibition for an environmental film festival, particularly as they resonate with some of the issues raised in the various threads in this month's topic of wired sustainability.  I think that we will benefit from your responses to our recent thinking.

For the first exhibition, "Undisclosed Recipients" (2007), we were concerned with ways that digital media and the internet might be recuperated to facilitate communication among people in disparate parts of the "wired world" -- and perhaps even across digital divides into the wireless world.  We were interested in work that engaged with ways that globalization and digitization affect environments (in their broadest definitions -- physical, virtual, imaginative) and cultural/political diversity.  We were also interested in work that appropriated extant technological forms, such as Flash or RAM, toward political and artistic ends in ways that mods and hacks have also done.

Some examples of work from the exhibition include "Flag Metamorphoses" (http://www.thyes.com/flag-metamorphoses/flag-animation.html), a collaborative work conceived by Myriam THYES that might be understood as a type of ambient media since the short animations, which link the flags of two "nations" via an animated narrative of their interconnection, can be looped and have been embedded in various public screens to disrupt thinking about the "official" division of the world into sanctioned nation-states.  "Permanent Transit" (http://www.kabul-reconstructions.net/transit/), part of the Kabul Project, is a collaborative work conceived by Mariam GHANI that includes a multi-channel piece that links to a web documentary about the reconstruction of Kabul and the displacement of exile.  Deploying a database structure, user interaction triggers algorithms to select audio and visual files from subsets.  Landscapes become interchangeable, but experiences of these landscapes defy communication across generation.  Christina McPHEE's "La Conchita, mon amour" (http://www.christinamcphee.net/la_conchita.html) explores, among other issues, the limitations of digital images to serve as evidence for physical and psychical trauma by examining official response to mudslides in the U.S.  We found that these works potentially open history and geography to debate to anyone with high-speed internet access.

For the second exhibition, "ubuntu.kuqala" (2008), we continued the curatorial threads of the previous exhibition, but we were less interested in questioning the techo-utopianism and cyber-optimism of intercontectivity via the internet.  Instead, we wanted to explore the intersubjectivity suggested by Ubuntu.  Rather than the Cartesian, "I think, therefore I am," for example, Ubuntu offers, "I am because we are" (very loose translation) as a framework for thinking about sustainability and environmentalism as issues that are not located in specific sites but are embedded in networks that affect all sites.

Among the works included were "Soweto Uprising" (http://sowetouprisings.com/site/), which Sharon mentioned, a web-application mashup by Ismail FAROUK and Babak FAKHAMZADEH that "maps" the contested history of Soweto onto Google Maps, allowing user comments from participants and witnesses and linking to RSS feeds for a sort of participation "unawares" by strangers.  Access, of course, is a clear obstacle to this project.  Another piece, "eknewtown" (http://www.eknewtown.com./) by Sylvia Grace BORDA, is a digital archive on the unsustainable "New Town" of East Kilbridge (Scotland), a modernist project that aspired to create spaces for living and well being.  Since "New Towns" are being dismantled as failed modernist experiments, the project becomes exercises in both historiography and archeology.  We also included The Hub (http://hub.witness.org/) by Witness, a web site for the exhibition of activist videos that also includes training information for amateur video-makers.  We were interested in The Hub in relation to activist videos posted on YouTube and in Second Life, and also in relation to community and indigenous media centers, bringing to the fore questions of access and trust.  Like the previous exhibition, this one is heterogeneous in terms of the models of work -- some involve user interface, others are web-based videos, still others allow users to contribute data to the work -- as well as in terms of political engagement -- some are concerned with satire and parody, some with activism, others with preservation and reactivation of memory.

A few of the issues/questions/ideas that have most interested me are ways that open-source collaborative models for media praxes might sustain political diversity while acknowledging that the internet is easily controlled by various state and corporate pressures upon ISPs.  At FLEFF this year, Sharon and I participated in a panel discussion with Stephanie ROTHENBERG, whose work Patty discussed in relation to the interfaces of labor and affect in SL and IRL in her project "The School of Perpetual Learning," and Nick KNOUF, who is developing "Fluid Nexus" (http://www.inclusiva-net.es/fluidnexus/), a project for micro-networks for mobile phones linked by bluetooth, thereby bypassing centralized mobile phone hubs.  I was really intrigued by Henry WARWICK's post on sustainability in relation to the materiality of resources that permits digital and internet technologies, as well as his work and mentioned by everyone in response.  I'd like to hear more thoughts on that thread, particularly for work that can be exhibited online, as well as thoughts on whether digital and internet technologies might still offer possibilities for moving around eurocentric traditions of mimesis/abstraction and political/complicit that Simon TAYLOR described.

Dale



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