[-empyre-] cyber-animism

[Rodney Berry]

welcome back to the ground Tamiko!

can you give us a bit of a run-down on what Manifest.AR have cooking for the
Venice Biennale - or izit seekrets?:)

Rod.

On Tue, Apr 19, 2011 at 2:02 PM, Tamiko Thiel <tamiko at alum.mit.edu> wrote:

> Hi Y'all,
>
> I'm not sure at this point if I'm supposed to be 'on' this week or next
> week, but since I have some spare moments during a plane ride to compose an
> email I thought I'd fire off a couple of curve balls.
>
> I want to pick up John Craig Freeman's ball on monuments and memorials in
> public squares, and Davin Heckman's ball on AR as 'folk practice' by which
> he meant graffiti, and throw then even further:
>
> The urge to augment is a deep seated part of human culture, with the first
> forms of augmented reality being cave paintings and 3D cult artifacts. The
> perception of an entire sphere of existence surrounding us but invisible to
> those without the proper "sight" has been with us from the beginning and is
> only lacking today in atheists who don't believe in science. Especially in
> cultures with animist folk practices like Catholicism, Islam, Buddhism,
> Hinduism etc etc the profane world is still strongly augmented with saints
> and spirits, and the images and effigies that represent their presence. Plus
> the large number of nominally Protestant peoples who talk to God and believe
> in angels and aliens lead me to believe that the number of people who
> believe that the only world around us is what we see is small indeed.
>
> My favorite book on this topic is Margaret Wertheim's "Pearly Gates of
> Cyberspace," which was written at the height of the VR and (the first)
> virtual worlds craze in the 1990s, but can be applied equally well to AR. We
> had a vast space that we could populate at will and we called it the
> heavens, until the advancing sciences drove the boundaries further and
> further back. I agree with Wertheim that this is why virtual worlds and AR
> are both so captivating, because cyberspace gives us back the huge canvas
> that we used to have - but it is blank, not populated by eons of cult
> practices or under priestly control.
>
> Enough for one post.
>
> Also, probably because I neglected to send in a recent bio, the one that
> was posted to the list was from over ten years ago with a broken website
> link, so here's an update with functioning link:
>
> Tamiko Thiel (www.mission-base.com/tamiko/) is an American media artist
> based in Munich. She is developing the dramatic and poetic capabilities of
> various forms of virtual and augmented reality as a medium for exploring
> social and cultural issues, often focusing on site-specific works. She shows
> internationally at venues such as the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in
> Venice, the Metropolitan Museum of Photography in Tokyo, the ZKM in
> Karlsruhe, the International Center for Photography in New York, the
> Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and in London, and at media art
> festivals such as Siggraph and ISEA. Her work has been supported by grants
> from institutions like the Japan Foundation, the MIT Center for Advanced
> Visual Studies, the City of Munich, the Berlin Hauptstadtkulturfonds and the
> IBM Innovation Award. She is a co-founder of the Manifest.AR cyberartists
> group, and is spearheading the Manifest.AR intervention at the 2011 Venice
> Biennial.
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>
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