[-empyre-] Welcome to the October discussion: "Contextualizing Making Sense"

[Renate Ferro]

October 2010 on ­empyre- soft-skinned space:  ³Contextualizing Making Sense²
 
Moderated by Renate Ferro (US) and Timothy Murray (US) with
 
Special guests Lorna Collins (UK), Janice Perry (US), Fred McVitte (UK),
Penny Florence (US), John Cayley (US), Frank O²Caine (US),  Rebekah Samkuel
(US), Cristina Bonilla (CA), Xena Lee, Alexander Wilson (CA), Steve Potter
(UK), Kelina Gotman (UK) and other Making Sense participants to be
announced.  
            
http://www.subtle.net/empyre
 
Since 2002, the new media listserv, empyre- soft_skinned_space has provided
an emergent and experimental forum for public thought and dialogue about
digital art and culture.  The lists 1400 members include the widest variety
of participants, from artists, designers,
and curators to academics, teachers, and arts administrators. Renate Ferro
and Tim Murray will be hosting the October discussion on empyre in
conjunction with The Making Sense Colloquium held at the IRI-Centre
Pompidou, Institut Télécom the 19th and 20th of October.
<http://www.makingsensesociety.org/>
 
Throughout this month we will be featuring participants of the Paris venue
including organizer Lorna Collins. Collins and the Making Sense team defines
the act of Making Sense on the website as
 
³an act of reflection that is at once theoretical and practical, accessible,
and inclusive.  While diverse in our practices and our disciplines, we have
a common striving to cross between modes of doing and thinking art and
philosophy, especially within the contemporary context.²
 
In examining the collective notion of Sense, Renate Ferro and Tim Murray
will act as on-site commentators simultaneously opening the discussion up to
our international subscribers. While many of the guests in the Making Sense
Colloquium will be talking about their projects our 1400 subscribers are
invited to open up the possibilities of the act of making sense through
understanding and the broader notion/translation making sensorium a space
between practice and theory, performance and space (both virtual and real).
 
===================================================
 
Moderated by Renate Ferro (US)
Renate Ferro is a media artist working in emerging technology and culture.
Her artistic practice reflects critical interactivity incorporating social
and theoretical paradigms of the psychological and sociological condition
with networks of technology. At the heart of her most recent interests,
Ferro critically engages the corporal body's symbiotic relationship with
technology. By aligning artistic, creative practice with critical approaches
to cyber configurations, she permits emerging creative skins of networks and
resources whose resulting configurations range from drawing and text to
performance, installation, and net-based projects.
 
Her work is represented in both corporate and private collections across the
United States as well as in Canada, France, Germany, and Australia. She has
exhibited her work also in China and Mexico. Her work has been published in
such journals as Diacritics, Theatre Journal, and Epoch. She is a Visiting
Assistant Professor in Art at Cornell University and is the founder and
director of the Tinker Factory a new media lab for interdisciplinary art
practice and research also housed at Cornell.
She is co-moderator for the online new media list serve-EMPYRE-soft-skinned
space and the art/imaging editor of the journal Diacritics published by the
Johns Hopkins University Press.
 
Timothy Murray is Founding Curator of the Rose Goldsen Archive of
New Media Art (http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu/
<http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu/> ), Director of the
Society for the Humanities (http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/
<http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/> ), and
Professor of Comparative Literature and English.  Co-Managing
Moderator of the -empyre- new media listserv, and co-curator of
CTHEORY MULTIMEDIA, he is a curator of new media art and a philosopher of
art, media and the digital arts.  His exhibitions include Contact Zones: The
Art of CD-Rom (US, Mexico, France, China, Canada) and INFOS 2000 (Slovenia),
with books on Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds (Minnesota,
2008), Zonas de Contacto: el arte en
CD-Rom (Centro de la Imagen, 1999), Drama Trauma: Specters of Race and
Sexuality in Performance, Video, Art (Routledge, 1997), Like a Film:
Ideological Fantasy on Screen, Camera, and Canvas (Routledge, 1993),
and, ed., Mimesis, Masochism & Mime: The Politics of Theatricality in
Contemporary French Thought (Michigan, 1997)."
 
With Guests: 
During the first few days of this discussion we will highlight the work of
Lorna Collins, organizer of the Making Sense Colloquium and Visiting
Artists, Janice Perry and Fred McVitter.  Later this week our other special
guests and their biographies forwarded to you.
 
Lorna Collins (UK) 
Lorna Collins is an art theorist and arts journalist, guided by her
strong interest in arts practice. Collins is currently undertaking her
PhD at the University of Cambridge, where she is a Foundation Scholar
at Jesus College. Her philosophical work develops the concept of
Making Sense through the aesthetic theories of Deleuze and Guattari,
Jean-Luc Nancy, Rancière and Bernard Stiegler. The point of her
research is to build an understanding of how engaging with art,
through French theory, helps us to make sense of the world, which then
moves a theoretical interpretation towards an actual praxis, with
various Making Sense events being held around the world.
 
Janice Perry (USA) 
Performance artist Janice Perry tours internationally with her
solo stage work. She¹s received multiple grants and fellowships for
live performance, teaching, and visual art from the Fulbright
Commission/US Department of State, the Vermont Arts Council and the
NEA, and others. Perry has led groups of emerging and established
artists in creating new multi-media work in the USA, Europe and South
Africa. Her work has been adapted for radio, television and print,
screened at film festivals, and exhibited in the USA and Europe. Perry
teaches interdisciplinary theatre courses at the University of Vermont
and holds an MFA-IA from Goddard College. Being Derrida was a
semi-finalist in the (USA) National Portrait Gallery/Smithsonian
Institution¹s 2009 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. See also
www.janiceperry.com <http://www.janiceperry.com/>
 
Fred McVittie (UK) 
Fred McVittie is an artist and educator currently based in the Performance
department of University College Falmouth.  His background is in performance
and experimental theatre, having worked with companies such as Forced
Entertainment, Manact, and Pants Performance Association.  More recently his
work has been in social media, particularly blogging and video sharing,
looking at these media as both sites for performative engagement and as
tools which allow for the redefinition of concepts such as knowledge and
art.
 
 
Renate Ferro
URL:  http://www.renateferro.net
Lab: http://www.tinkerfactory.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/