[-empyre-] February on -empyre-: New Media and the Middle East

[Renate Ferro]

>February 2011 on -empyre- soft_skinned space
>
>"New Media and the Middle East"
>
>Moderated by Renate Ferro (US) and Tim Murray 
>(US) with Mirene Arsanios (Lebanon), Eliot Bates 
>(US), Isak Berbic (UAE), Tarek Elhaik  (US), 
>Mayssa Fattouh (Qatar), Shuruq Harb (Palestine), 
>Horit Herman Peled (IS), Laura U. Marks (Cn), 
>Kevin and Jennifer McCoy (US/UAE), Nat Müller 
>(Netherlands), Larissa Sansour (UK).

http://empyre.library.cornell.edu/

This month's geopolitical focus on new media and 
the Middle East will provide a framework for 
engaging in a wide-range of interdisciplinary 
approaches to new media art and theory. 
Featured guests will introduce their practices 
across a range of media and cultural traditions, 
from video, interactive, and relational media to 
photography, sound, and gaming.  Equally 
important will be curatorial and social 
initiatives.    In so doing they will engage in a 
discussion of how  the cultural, political, and 
theoretical specificities of the Middle East 
contribute to and impact artistic practice?  What 
role does technology play in artistic and 
curatorial practice, and how do Middle Eastern 
histories, customs, and politics inform this 
contribution?  Is there a way that new 
technologies and their artistic expression 
enhance reflection on geopolitical considerations 
important to the region and its reception?  Or 
might new technology itself exemplify the 
paradoxes or tensions that in themselves have 
informed the artistic and curatorial practices of 
our guests.  And, flowing from January's 
discussion, how might the list's discussion of 
the Netopticon dialogue with artistic and 
curatorial practices in the Middle East?  Are 
there ways that flows between artistic and 
geopolitical  borders contribute to political and 
conceptual thinking about the "Middle" as it 
informs both "East" and "West"?

=================================================================
Moderated by:
Renate Ferro (US) is a conceptual and new media 
artist working in emerging technology, 
participatory installation, and digital culture. 
She is the Co-Managing Moderator of  -empyre- and 
the art/imaging editor of the journal diacritics 
published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. 
She teaches in the College of Architecture, Art, 
and Planning at Cornell University.  She has 
recently staged participatory exhibitions and 
installations  in Berlin, Chiapas, Mexico, and 
Pécs, Hungary.  She directed an intervention in 
October for -empyre- at the Making Sense 
Colloquium at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and 
teaches new media and conceptual art at Cornell 
University.

Tim Murray (US) is the Curator of the Rose 
Goldsen Archive of New Media Art at Cornell 
University and Co-Managing Moderator of 
-empyre-.  He is Director of the Society for the 
Humanities and Professor Comparative Literature 
and English at Cornell.  He sits on the Steering 
Committee of HASTAC and is the author of numerous 
books and articles on new media, film and video, 
contemporary art, performance, and theory, 
including Digital Baroque: New Media Art and 
Cinematic Folds.

Featured Guests:

Mirene Arsanios (Lebanon)  is curator, critic, 
and co-founder of 98weeks Project Space and 
artist organization in Beirut.  She studied art 
history in Rome and received her Masters in 
Contemporary Art from Goldsmiths College, London. 
She previously worked as a researcher at Ashkal 
Alwan and as an Assistant Curator at MACRO, 
Museum of Contemporary Art Rome. She now teaches 
at the American University of Beirut.

Eliot Bates (US) is an ethnomusicologist 
specializing in digital audio recording cultures 
and the production of contemporary music in 
Istanbul, Turkey.   He is a Society for the 
Humanities ACLS Fellow in Music at Cornell 
University.  He has published, Music in Turkey: 
Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture (Oxford) 
and co=founded the dancecult.net collaborative 
bibliography project and the open source journal, 
Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music 
Culture.

Isak Berbic (UAE) is an artist, writer and 
lecturer born in Bosnia and Herzegovina, at that 
time called Yugoslavia. In 1992 as Yugoslavia 
dissolved and Bosnia was under attack, he and his 
family became refugees, moving from Croatia, 
through the Czech Republic to a refugee camp in 
Denmark, and lastly to the United States.  In 
2007 he moved to the Middle East; United Arab 
Emirates, where he currently teaches media at the 
College of Fine Arts and Design, University of 
Sharjah. He is a continuing contributor to 
numerous projects and publications on 
contemporary art. His research deals with 
histories, politics, tragedy, memory, humor, 
exile, and the limits of representation.

Tarek Elhaik (US) is an anthropologist, film 
curator, and Assistant Professor of Cinema
Studies at San Francisco State University. He situates his conceptual,
sensorial and ethnographic investigations of Modernity at the frontier
of anthropology, trans-cultural cinema, contemporary media arts and
curatorial work. He is particularly interested in the intersection between
the history of clinical concepts, political culture, curatorial
practice, and new media practices in both Latin America and the Middle
East.

Mayssa Fattouh (Qatar) is an independent curator 
and cultural practitioner born in Beirut and 
currently based in Doha Qatar. Fattouh has been 
developing her practice between Beirut, Dubai and 
Bahrain where she worked as Curatorial and 
Program Manager at Al Riwaq Gallery. Her latest 
ongoing project 
<http://receptiveground.blogspot.com/>Receptive 
Ground, is a web based archive platform 
addressing subjects of art and culture in the 
Middle East and the Arab Gulf. Fattouh is 
currently pursuing her Master's of Arts in 
Communication at The European Graduate School in 
Saas-Fee, Switzerland.

Shuruq Harb (Palestine) is an artist based in 
Ramallah, Palestine. Working with text and 
photography, her artistic practice deals with 
issues around writing, language and image.  Harb 
has worked on several online projects such Across 
Borders in 2005/2006, and is currently developing 
online photography courses for  Birzeit 
University 's Virtual Gallery. She is the 
co-founder of ArtTerritories, an online platform 
for critical exchange on matters of art and 
visual culture in the Middle East and the Arab 
World.

Horit Herman Peled (Israel) is an artist, peace 
activist, and theorist.  She resides in Tel Aviv 
and teaches new media and theory at the Art 
Institute, Oranim College, Israel.
Horit Herman Peled is an artist, peace activist 
and theorist. Resides in Tel Aviv and teaches new 
media and theory at the Art Institute, Oranim 
College, Israel. Most recent publication: "Post 
Post Zionism: Confronting the Demise of the 
Two-State Solution," New Left Review, 67, 
January-February 2011 (co-authored with Yoav 
Peled).  

Laura U. Marks (Canada) is the Dena Wosk 
University Professor of Art and Culture Studies 
at Simon Fraser University.  A scholar, theorist, 
and curator of independent and experimental media 
arts, she is the author of The Skin of the Film: 
Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses 
(Duke University Press, 2000),Touch: Sensuous 
Theory and Multisensory  Media (Minnesota 
University Press, 2002).  Several years of 
research in Islamic art history and philosophy 
gave rise to her new book Enfoldment and 
Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art 
(MIT Press, 2010). She has curated programs of 
experimental media for venues around the world. 
Her current research interests are the media arts 
of the Arab and Muslim world, intercultural 
perspectives on new media art, and philosophical 
approaches to materiality and information culture.

Kevin and Jennifer McCoy (US/UAE) are a Brooklyn, 
New York couple who make art together, and are 
now located in Abu Dhabi while Kevin launches the 
art program at the Persian Gulf campus of New 
York University.  Their current exhibition at 
Postmasters in New York, "Abu Dhabi is Love 
Forever" explores their experiences in the media 
rich environment of the UAE.  They work with 
interactive media, film, performance and 
installation to explore personal experience in 
relation to new technology, the mass media, and 
global commerce.  They often re-examine classic 
genres and works of cinema, science fiction or 
television narrative, creating sculptural 
objects, net art, robotic movies or live 
performance.

Nat Müller (Netherlands) is an independent 
curator and critic based in Rotterdam. She has 
held positions as staff curator at V2_, Institute 
for Unstable Media (Rotterdam) and De Balie, 
Centre for Culture and Politics (Amsterdam). Her 
main interests include: the intersections of 
aesthetics, media and politics; (new) media and 
art in the Middle East. She has published 
articles in off- and online media. Her  projects 
include Xeno_Sonic: a series of experimental 
sound performances from the Middle East 
(Amsterdam, 2005), the workshop 'Between a Rock 
and a Hard Place? Negotiating Artistic Practice, 
Audiences, Representation and Collaboration 
within Local and International Frameworks' 
(Amman, 2007).  She was the first 
curator-in-residence at the Townhouse Gallery in 
Cairo (2008-2009), and serves as an advisor on 
Euro-Med collaboration to the ECF and the 
European Commission.

Larissa Sansour (UK) was born in Jerusalem and 
lives in London after studying  Fine Art in 
Copenhagen, London, and New York.  Her work is 
immersed in the current political dialogue and 
utilizes video art, photography, experimental 
documentary, the book form and the internet.  By 
approximating the nature, reality, and complexity 
of life in Palestine and the Middle East to 
visual forms normally associated with television 
and televised pastime, her schemes clash with the 
gravity expected from works commenting on the 
region.  She has participated in the Busan 
Biennial in Korea, the Third Guangzhou Triennia, 
Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, PhotoCairo4, 
Dubai International Film Festival, Istanbul 
Biennial and Loverpool Biennial.
-- 
Renate Ferro and Tim Murray
Managing Co-Moderators, -empyre- a soft-skinned-space
Department of Art/ Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
Cornell University