[-empyre-] Participatory Art: Linda Dement on Digital Traces

[rtf9 at cornell.edu]

>Over the next week or so Tim and I will be posting a couple of posts 
>from invited artist's, curators, and theorists who have written a 
>brief response to this month's discussion topic.  We are hoping that 
>our subscribers will not only respond to these guests but also post 
>their own responses, ideas, thoughts about these issues.


Many thanks to Miyawaki Atsuko for inspiring Week #3's discussion and 
to all of you who have responded to Atsuko.

 From special Guest Linda Dement

  Linda Dement (Australia) has been working with arts computing since
>  1989. She has authored screen based interactives, multi-computer
>  installations and collaborated in translocal and performative new
>  media events. Her work has been widely exhibited, including at the
>  ICA in London, Ars Electronica, International Symposia of Electronic
>  Art and the Impakt Media Arts Festival in Europe. She is twice winner
>  of the Australian National Digital Art Award and has been awarded a
>  New Media Arts Fellowship by the Australia Council for the Arts.
>

>From: Linda Dement <linda at lindadement.com>
>To: "Timothy Murray , renate ferro" <tcm1 at cornell.edu>
>Subject: Re: Invitation to Join "Participatory Art: Digital 
>Traces,": -empyre-in June
>Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2009 13:19:23 +1000
>
>Digital Traces
>
>I click a link and a thousand bots align, take note, cross reference 
>and transplant the information into databases. I am a data mine. My 
>choices and wanderings take form in the scurrying and crowding of 
>bots. I follow links I have no interest in just to watch them swarm. 
>I sign on to facebook under yet another name just to fuck with them. 
>In gmail love letters I throw in words: shoes, family sedan, luxury 
>yacht, light bulbs, coaxing the ads to turn in the wrong direction 
>and leave us pashing in the dark corner.
>
>Protect yourself with lies. Distract them with what they want. Feed 
>them like pigeons. It's quite beautiful when the light catches their 
>wings.
>
>Someone links to my stuff and they scribble frantically on 
>clipboards. This non-meeting of interest takes its shape in their 
>chant "Popularity and relevance. Popularity and relevance."
>
>We humans copy each others code and push it into different forms; 
>dropping a line, modifying parameters, typing in some new slant.  We 
>put it up, and in turn, someone else copies it and goes to work on 
>their own iteration. The bots seem to pay no mind to this track of 
>mutation. Darwin would wet himself; all the generations alive in the 
>moment for immediate comparison. You could line them up like stills 
>from a morph.
>
>The electromagnetic principle that a conductor linking a changing 
>magnetic field creates a potential difference across its ends, that 
>there is a flow of electrons, powers it all. The source of this flow 
>is over 80 percent coal filth here in Oz. The waters around Pacific 
>Islands rise. The polar bears on tv are starving as their ice melts. 
>But I pay for green power, so I continue until I'm done.
>
>The bots withdraw a millisecond before the electricity is cut and 
>the network shuts down. They always make it out in time. They're 
>psychic. What's left is dead hardware. Time for an upgrade. Not that 
>it's old. Not that it wouldn't still work. Like yearling beef, it's 
>not left to gristle and toughen. We like to kill them young. We like 
>to move on to fattening the next calf.
>
>The thump hollow where it hits the dirt crushes four ants and some 
>small plants. In the crater, the dead things rot into nutrients and 
>the still living repair around the scar. Cadmium, lead, mercury and 
>whatever else leech downwards and outwards for years. The ants were 
>lucky to go fast. The earthbound plume of poisons is less like the 
>linear marks of a GPS tracked journey, more of a massive watercolour 
>wash with areas of intensity and weakness. Always fluid, It pools in 
>hollows, drains with gravity, wicks upward in roots, stems, 
>cardboard boxes, discarded clothes, anything fibrous.
>
>I'm sorry, I have gone off topic a little and paid no particular 
>attention to participatory art, only the cyber - material - 
>configurations of a more general engagement. Participatory art, 
>non-paticipatory art, social networking, office spreadsheets, an 
>email to mum; digital traces leave marks, ruin and exquisite 
>formations at every turn.
>
>empyre forum
>empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>http://www.subtle.net/empyre


-- 
Renate Ferro
URL:  http://www.renateferro.net
Email:   <rtf9 at cornell.edu>
,
Visiting Assistant Professor of Art
Cornell University
Department of Art, Tjaden Hall
Ithaca, NY  14853

Co-moderator of _empyre soft skinned space
http://www.subtle.net/empyre
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyre

Art Editor, diacritics
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/dia/