[-empyre-] Introducing Eliot Bates, Horit Herman Peled, Nat Müller

[Timothy Murray]

Thanks ever so much Larissa and Isak for getting 
this month's discussion of "New Media and the 
Middle East" off to such a productive start. 
Your framing promises to shape the discussion 
throughout month to come.  We hope to continue to 
hear your voices as we continue with our other 
featured guests.

We're now happy to introduce this week's featured 
guests, Eliot Bates (US), Horit Herman Peled 
(Israel), and Nat Müller (Netherlands).   Eliot, 
Horit, and Nat come from varied backgrounds and 
work across the disciplines in ways that will 
push the limits of our considerations.

This year we have come to appreciate the nuanced 
perspective and broad erudition of Eliot Bates 
(US) across the fields of electronic music and 
new media art during his residency in the Music 
Department and  the Society for the Humanities at 
Cornell.  Eliot is an ethnomusicologist 
specializing in digital audio recording cultures 
and the production of contemporary music in 
Istanbul, Turkey.    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.  In addition, Musiq.com 
features Eliot's electronic and electro-acoustic 
work, including his solo records as Kaderci, his 
collaborative recordings and performances as 
Basquerole (with Dan Fries), Village Uprising 
(with Wayne Dean Parkison), Kinetic Trance (with 
Tobias Roberson), and 3Spell (with Lila Sklar and 
Tobias).

We are delighted to welcome back to -empyre- our 
long time collaborator, Horit Herman Peled 
(Israel) with whom Tim first worked in 1999  when 
he curated Contact Zones: The Art of CD-Rom 
(http://contactzones.cit.cornell.edu/) for which 
Horit exhibited "Interventions-Hebron."  Many of 
you on the list will have come to appreciate 
Horit's interventions over the years.  Horit 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.  Her projects on Israeli border crossings 
and feminist politics have been widely received 
internationally.   Her 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).

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.

Thanks so much for your participation, Eliot, 
Horit, and Nat.  We are looking forward to your 
hearing about your work and perspectives at this 
crucial moment in the Middle East.

All our best,

Tim and Renate


-- 
>  > >> 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