[-empyre-] January 2008 on -empyre- soft-skinned space: Stations, Sites and Volatile Landscapes

[Christina McPhee]

January 2008 on -empyre- soft-skinned space:


Stations, Sites and Volatile Landscapes


http://www.subtle.net/empyre


with Naeem Mohaiemen, Katherine Carl, Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss, Nat  
Muller and John Haber


In the wake of the post-war situationists, the seventies Moebius-strip  
concept of “site/non-site” initiated a dynamic of ironic play as if  
subjectivity and the art object interpolated freely, to project a new  
participatory space. On offer was a new kind of public transgression,  
produced at ground level. Post 9/11, new media is ‘after the net’.  
What follows in the traces of the site/non-site? Globalization  
inflects locality through branding, privatization and glamour from the  
top down. The ubiquity of digital tools as integrated circuitry within  
hypercapitalism and war opens onto an ethical problem for media arts  
-- how to extend free modes of encounter: here sites become stations.

Please join us!

Subscribe at  http://www.subtle.net/empyre



Our guest this month:


--Naeem Mohaiemen (BD/US) works in Dhaka/New York , using video,  
archive and text. Areas of investigation include national security  
panic, failed
revolutionary movements, and the slippage between utopia and  
dystopia.Projects include a multiyear investigation of hysterical  
conditions
(Visible Collective, disappearedinamerica.org), My Camera Can Lie? (UK  
House of Lords), and Sartre Kommt Nacht Stammheim (Pavillion).
http://shobak.org

--Katherine Carl (School of Missing Studies)  (US)  is writing her PhD  
on conceptual art of the sixties and seventies in the former  
Yugoslavia in the Department of Art History and Criticism at the State  
University of New York, Stony Brook, and currently holds a fellowship  
from the American Council of Learned Societies. For two years in  
2005-2006, she was Curator of Contemporary Exhibitions at The Drawing  
Center after her work as Assistant Curator there. This follows her  
work at Dia Art Foundation (1999-2003), ArtsLink (1996-1997) and the  
National Endowment for the Arts (1991-1995). Carl taught art history  
and contemporary culture in the Department of Art at New York  
University (2002-3). She was curator of Flipside: ArtsLink at Artists  
Space (2004) and go_HOME (2001), and is a founding member of School of  
Missing Studies.


--Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss (SP/US)  (School of Missing Studies) is an  
architect and founder of NAO (Normal Architecture Office) as well as  
founding member of the School of Missing Studies. His book /Almost  
Architecture/ published by Merz & Solitude and kuda.nao about  
architecture vis-à-vis emerging democratic processes is available  
through Vice Versa Vertrieb. Weiss has recently collaborated with  
Herzog & de Meuron architects and is currently faculty at the  
University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia as well as a PhD candidate  
at Goldsmiths College, London. He is currently in design process for  
Stadium Culture in collaboration with kuda.org: New Media Centre in  
Novi Sad to preserve public spaces left from socialist planning. www.thenao.net


--Nat Muller  (NL) Is an independent curator and critic based in  
Rotterdam. She has held positions as staff curator at V2_, Institute  
for Unstable Media (Rotterdam) and De Balie, Centre for Culture and  
Politics (Amsterdam). Her main interests include: the intersections of  
aesthetics, media and politics; (new) media and art in the Middle  
East. She recently co-edited the Mag.net Reader2: Between Paper and  
Pixel with Alessandro Ludovico (2007), and Mag.net Reader3: Processual  
Publlishing. Actual gestures. (forthcoming 2008). She is co-initiator  
of the Upgrade! Amsterdam. In 2008 she will spend a year at the  
Townhouse Gallery in Cairo as curator-in-residence.


--John Haber (US) is a prolific American art critic who lives in New  
York. He uses the perspective of critical theory in an  
accessible,journalistic prose to write online reviews and essays about  
topics ranging from traditional Art History, Modernism and  
Postmodernism. When his New York Art Crit site started in 1994 with  
art reviews from around New York, it was the most thorough and  
extensive set of gallery and museumreviews anywhere online. This art  
hyperbook currently features about 700 artists, critics, and art  
historians from the early Renaissance to Postmodernism, with more than  
5,000 links between reviews. Of special interest is the connection of  
art to feminism, philosophy, and politics.His essays on New Media  
bridge the interplay between science and art.
Many of Haber’s articles have also appeared in Artillery Magazine,  
Perfect 8, Artists Books Reviews, American Abstract Artists, and  
Sharkforum. http://haberarts.com




Moderated by Christina McPhee, http://christinamcphee.net