[-empyre-] -empyrean- space
Christina McPhee
christina at christinamcphee.net
Thu Feb 21 09:18:27 EST 2008
dear -empyre-
I 've been under the weather and under a lot of work this month, but
finally have a chance to come up for air and look around. Our topic,
Stations, Sites and Volatile Landscapes, is still active til the end
of February. Melinda will begin a new topic March 1.
In any event, I've been thinking about -empyrean- space and process--
how it is or could be a space and a work of art, and how its
processual editing prcoess works via all concerned (moderators and
writerlyreaders and readerlywriters) .Here are some off the top
thoughts and images -- perhaps you guys can help me out. Comments,
riffs, declamations welcome.
I’ve been interested in the remix like everybody else in new media.
but it seems important to try to do something beyond just
recontextualizing information. There is no dearth of opportunities for
communicating online so it’s really about what makes people want to
contribute, to write, even formally, or more conversationally, in an
open self generative work that still stays somehow grounded. It seems
so important to get past the tyranny of presets in digital media, the
multiple choice aspect of everything web 2.0-- and so the leanest most
minimal structure, or rules of the game, seem delightful and even
fanciful-- if there is not a ‘formatting’ issue or a cgi interface for
selection among predetermined choices, will people want to play? So
the whole idea of empyre has til now been to keep things really
nonvisual, focussed on the word, on a sort of expanded even trippy
aesthetic of letter-writing. Its so old school it’s almost Jane
Austen. Much virtual ink is bled over the problem of how to establish
transborder dialogues, how to create a public ‘heterotopia’ and this
is a desire with more than political and aesthetic overtones, indeed
reaches into the realm of magical thinking: as if, we wish to believe,
we can overcome the loneliness, isolation, and profound distraction
secondary to the media glut, by the strange harmonics of a
conversation through as archaic and nonvisual a medium as the lowly
email. I subscribe wholeheartedly to these fantasies. Or they may be
the symptoms of an incipient delirium-- a fever of desire for some
harmonics across a spectrum of human speech far wider than the normal
audible range of the internet. Wider in the sense not of bandwith but
of the human spirit--I hope for a kind of expansive mood of play to
take hold amongst this self selected, mostly silent group of a
thousand readers/writers. For me as artist and editor this hope
carries out through seduction and juxtaposition. I try to entice
special guests to give of their time and to meet and respond to other
guests whom they probably do not know personally, or have never met,
and who are not necessarily likely to share a common argot. I remind
them to post often and with generosity, and without expectation of
response from the elusive -empyrean- readership, whose silence is the
norm. The silence is a kind of nurturing presence: you get the
feeling, when you write on -empyre- that many are paying close
attention, or that perhaps your thoughts are winging into their
drifts-- as they access email on high speed bullet trains via
blackberries and pods. Or there is another kind of space on -empyre-,
at times, a not-slient, ricochet space like a handball court where
furious volleys rebound and strike. =empyre- is not a space of
understanding, it does not explain itself. It does not require
cooperation nor endorse neutrality. Posts, like hard balls at high
speeds, smash at each other. Often on my watch this condition of
almost violent play erupts unexpectedly. There will have been long
silences on the list, practically nothing happening, and then someone
takes up the game, and then more than one, and then, in the space of a
few hours, a plethora of hits-- but not ‘hits’ like the random visits
of bots and spiders and occasional humans to websites--rather hits in
the sense of blows, coups, counting coups.
I ‘ve been thinking a lot about Ant Farm lately. The late sixties/
seventies subversive architecture group was, in their own view, a self-
described “art politics”. Asked to comment on “Media Burn” , an
installation in which Ant Farm members drove through a wall of flaming
televisions using only a video camera mounted on the back of the car
hood for guidance through the flames, one Ant Farm member, “Uncle
Buddy” responded with reference to a kind of detournement of cars and
televisions into a (literally) explosive transposition: “the idea of
looping back into television the destruction of television.” *Like
Ant Farm whose interest to break up television in order to release, as
it were, video for provocative deployment, using the old industrial
image of wrecked and flaming cars, =empyre- declines the apparent
totalizing affectivity of the internet just by exercising (or
exorcising?), post upon post, the literary style of the brief (the
formal letter), if anything a communication that reaches its
apotheosis in eighteenth and early nineteenth Romantic writers at
least, sort of like stacking a string of wrecked cars. As one of the
producer of this latter-day ‘media burn’ I just try to light a couple
of fires on peoples’ laptops and see who drives through and what
happens when they do., The ‘image’ or ‘afterimage’ is the witness of
the hypertext itself.
*The quotes and context are from Felicity Scott's new book,
Architecture or Technoutopia, Chapter 8, "Shouting Apocalypse," p.
138. MIT Press 2007
Christina McPhee
http://christinamcphee.net
http://strikeslip.tv
http://naxsmash.net
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