[-empyre-] Demand Nothing, Occupy Everything? California is burning ....

[Renate Ferro]

Many thanks to Brooke Singer (US), Ricardo Dimenguez (US) and our
subscribers whose threads on viral communication, trans-border activism
and physical movement practice were expecially relevant to the activities
so pronounced in the state of California this past week.  I was working
with an undergraduate student yesterday who was complaining that he and
his peers participate in activism virtually online and after reading
Malcolm X he was if that was not a complacent place and space to exist in.
 I was happy to be able to show him the links that Ricardo, Ashley, David
and Cara shared with us this past week.

Week #4 on Viral Economies and Hactivating Design we welcome Trebor Scholz
who organized the recent conference in NYC, "The Internet as Playground
and Factory" and Machiko Kusahara who attended a recent conference here at
Cornell University on Networks and Mobilities. Their respective
biographies are below.

After their introductory remarks I'm hoping that guests and contributors
from previous weeks will join our subscribers in closing out the November
discussion.

Week # 4 Trebor  Scholz (US) and Machiko Kusahara (Japan)

Trebor Scholz teaches in the Department of Culture and Media Studies at
Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts in New York City. He
graduated from the Art Academy in Dresden (Germany), University College
London (UK), The Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, the
Hochschule für Kunst und Gestaltung in Zürich (Switzerland) and The
University of Plymouth (UK).

Over the last two years, Scholz' work was comprised of writing,
teaching, and conference organization. Dr. Trebor Scholz' research
interests focus on social media, especially in education, art, and media
activism (specifically outside the United States and Europe). His
artwork was shown at several Biennials and he has contributed numerous
book chapters and articles in the area of Internet Studies. Scholz
presented at many dozen conferences worldwide. In 2004, he founded the
Institute for Distributed Creativity (iDC). Its mailing list, which he
moderates, is one of the leading discussion forums in network culture.

Autonomedia published The Art of Free Cooperation of which he is the
co-editor in 2007. Scholz convened several major conferences including
Kosova: Carnival in the Eye of the Storm, Free Cooperation (with G.
Lovink), Share Widely, and Situated Technologies (with M. Shepard and O.
Khan) and The Internet as Playground and Factory (2009). He is currently
working on a monograph and an anthology on "digital labor."
http://digitallabor.org/

Machiko Kusahara is a scholar in media art, digital media culture and
media history who is a professor at Waseda University, Tokyo, and
currently a visiting scholar at the Art/Sci Center at UCLA.
She came into the field of digital media in early 1980s as a curator,
critic and theorist in computer graphics, co-curating and writing on the
SIGGRAPH Traveling Art Show in Tokyo in 1985. Since then she curated,
juried, organized and wrote internationally in digital art. She was also
involved in launching the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography and the
NTT InterCommunication Center in Tokyo.

Her major publications in English include: Telerobotics and Art -Presence,
Absence, and Knowledge in Telerobotics Art (The Robot in the Garden, MIT
Press 2000), From Ukiyo-e to Mobile Phone Screens - A Japanese Perspective
(Migrating Images, House of World Cultures 2004), They Are Born to Play:
Japanese Visual Entertainment from Nintento to Mobile Phones (Art Inquiry,
2004), Panorama Craze in Meiji Japan (Panorama Phenomenon 2006), Device
Art: A New Approach in Understanding Japanese Contemporary Media Art 
(MediaArtHistories 2007), Device Art: Media Art Meets Mass Production
(Digital by Design, 2008).

Currently Prof. Kusahara's major activities are on two related fields:
Device Art and Japanese history of visual entertainment from the 19th
century. Device Art is a project that involves ten artists and researchers
in Japan that focuses on developing and theorizing a new form of media art
that connects art, technology, design and products, with five-year grant
from JST (Japan Science and Technology Agency). The interplay between art,
technology, culture and society has been the theme of her research.

During this academic year Prof. Kusahara will be organizing "Gadget OK!",
a Device Art Symposium at UCLA.

Renate Ferro
Visiting Assistant Professor
Department of Art
Cornell University, Tjaden Hall
Ithaca, NY  14853

Email:   <rtf9 at cornell.edu>
Website:  http://www.renateferro.net


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/