[-empyre-] second try

[Renate Ferro]

Johanna et al,

Weirdly my first post did not go through so I'll try again.
Writing from upstate NY's very snowy winterland and wishing all of our
empyre subscribers and guests a very Happy New Year!

in regards to  your post most specifically
snip...
Activist art is a different
> matter, though it walks a thin line between patronizing benevolence
> and community empowerment, it can be an agent of actual change,
> creating cultural capital and symbolic force.

I'm hoping you were able to follow November and early December's discussion
on empyre "Viral Communication:  Hactivating Design"  Many of our
subscribers and guests such as Zach Blas, Ricardo Dominguez, Brooke Singer
among others talked about how their work, writing and actions work within
yet against the system they create in as a way to implode or critique
politically or socially.

Actually I'll pull out Zach Blas' post most specifically as he describes
his Queer Technologies project:
"To put it simply: QT starts from within the capitalist system so that it may
exploit its flows, distributions, and deployments in order to actually
expand outside of it and corrupt it. QT has always been interested in the
Deleuzian notion of accelerating a system to the point of implosion. This
seems to speak to the directionalities of resistant practices, that is, QT
thinks it is more productive, more subversive--in fact, it generally
increases the stakes--to not primarily practice a purely oppositional
resistance. Of course, when this is needed and/or called for, Queer
Technologies does not hesitate to perform in this manner."

By using technologies that buy into capitalism to exploit capitalism or to
use  complicity as a way to work back against it. Is this
counterproductive?   Often times it can be humorous, thought provoking,
etc but is it counterproductive?  Does it defeat the point?
 Renate
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/