[-empyre-] Critical Dromology - and terror, capital

[Timothy Murray]

>Hello, Navjotika and Jordan,

Thanks for posing such interesting questions this week.  I'd like to 
follow up by posing a rather simple question for general discussion. 
What is the role of the network, especially the artistic network, in 
the face of the catastrophic?  This seems to be an especially crucial 
issue today in the midst of the catastrophic collapse of the global 
economic network.   My friends in China, for instance, tell me that 
the economics sustaining that  vibrant art scene has suddenly become 
flat, as we read of failed art auctions and slow artistic sales on an 
international scale.  What lessons might we learn from this, 
particularly of a more interventionist, political nature?

It was on the other side of a similar catastrophe in the wake of the 
Japanese depression and Western economic slowdown in the late 80s 
that interactive and internet art took up the mantle of activist 
interventions in stale networks.   At that time the net seemed to 
promise an alternative option to the stultifying conditions and 
oppressive structures of the gallery system while providing energized 
artists with new tools for rethinking  social networking itself.

While I anticipate a rise in activist media projects in reaction to 
tired  responses to the global catastrophe, I'm wondering whether our 
internal experience with mapping and networking might not lead the 
new media community in other directions.

Any soft-skinned thoughts?

Tim


-- 
Timothy Murray
Director, Society for the Humanities
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/
Curator, The Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Cornell Library
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
A. D. White House
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853