[-empyre-] goodbye to Making Sense, Welcome Melinda Rackam

[Renate Ferro]

Many thanks to Misha, Steve and Kelena for finishing out the last week of
Contextualizing Making Sense.  I think all three of your posts brought out
the incredibly delicate balance that cross-disciplinary collaboration
requires. In any collaboration,  given a set of participants, each one must
bring his\ her own expertise and engaged critical voice to the process.

In merging our practical and theoretical interests, Tim and I have
collaborated in  both creative and curatorial endeavors each bringing a
different perspective to our joint ventures.  While I tend to envision the
practical as an artist, Tim's work as a writer and theoretician brings to
the mix a more theoretical voice. What this merger allows for is a
relational space where  theory and practice conjoin at times and at others
resist.

*As artist, writer, curator, teachers our practices often originate in the
seeds of instinct, whim, and hunch and then proceed through  play and work
via research, reading, discussion, investigation, often ending up in
reflective critical analysis only to return to the fold of our instincts
again. It is our collective observation that the  process of  “Making
Sense”  enfolds pleats of uneasiness, questioning, and restlessness. The
destabilization of this process incites and excites us to flow through the
momentum and energy at certain junctures NOT Making Sense that push us
through the flow of productive processes.*

**
*

Our collaborative work has long been influenced by broad reflection on
matters of performativity especially as it relates to politics, philosophy,
psychoanalysis, memory and fantasy, as well as the broader social paradigms
of technology, culture, and art.
What’s been exciting to both of us to realize how each of our various
interdisciplinary interfaces combining practice and theory has led us to do
such projects as moderators of  -empyre soft-skinned space.
*

This month on empyre, In examining the collective notion of Sense, our
mission was to provide an  opportunity where the virtual space of empyre and
the real spaces of the Pompidou, Paris and the participants of the Making
Sense Colloquium would collectively consider the possibilities of the act of
making sense through an inclusive understanding and the broader
notion/translation making sensorium a space where practice and theory
converge as performance and space (both virtual and real). Through this
inclusive reflection that was simultaneously  practical and theoretical we
attempted to collectively move between making and thinking art and
philosophy. We thank all of our guests who participated in our discussion
this month for their generosity in sharing their ideas.
This morning as we close our discussion we are writing from Berkeley,
California where we have been enjoying a visit with Ashley Ferro-Murray.  We
travelled to the West coast to see her collaborative performance with CNMAT
musicians, David Coll and Rama Godfried who worked with six performers to
create a relational space where movement and sound, real-time interaction
via sensors with networked information made Noisense. The mediatized space
of Noisesense, enabled a sensorium of spectacle, sound, movement, and
theoretical thought that presented to the audience spaces where critical
thought and engagement could network out from the performance.  Informed and
carefully crafted collaborations will generate the fruit of theoretical
thinking and from our point of view that is when these sorts of experiments
do lend themselves to successful marriages of practice and theory.

With that both Tim and I sign off for the month and welcome Melinda Rackam
who will introduce the November discussion on empyre.  Our apologies to her
in closing a bit late.  We look forward to her upcoming discussion.

Renate and Tim
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