[-empyre-] -empyre- Enfoldment and Infinity

[Laura Marks]

Hello Empyre folks, and nice to see you here, Jennifer and Kevin.

Time and Renate invited me along for this month on new media art in the Middle East in light of my new book, Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art. I hasten to say that in fact this *isn't* a book on new media in the Muslim world, though I discuss some contemporary media artists in the Arab and Muslim world who draw, intentionally or not, on classical Islamic aesthetics. Rather, it's a book on how new media art, or specifically, algorithmic art, is deeply informed by classical Islamic aesthetics, such as aniconism, algorithmicity, atomism, and performativity. My point is that all algorithmic art is "Islamic" whether it acknowledges it or not. It's a big and complex book, and this isn't a summary, but I'd be happy to discuss it further.

Laura


----- Original Message -----
From: "Timothy Murray" <tcm1 at cornell.edu>
To: "soft_skinned_space" <empyre at gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
Sent: Monday, February 21, 2011 8:13:39 PM
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] -empyre- Introducing Laura Marks, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, and Tarek Elhaik

We've again finished a fabulously informative 
week on -empyre-.  Thanks ever so much to Mirene 
Arsanios, Mayssa Fattough, and Sharuq Harb for 
sharing your thoughts, expertise, and vision. 
We have found your projects and discussion of the 
layered function of screen arts to be very 
inspiring.

We are happy to include our final group of 
featured guests for this month's discussion of 
"New Media and the Middle East,"  Laura Marks, 
Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, and Tarek Elhaik. 
Unfortunately, Tarek will be unable to join us 
this week in order to address a sudden medical 
issue, but we want to introduce him nevertheless, 
and include his name on our list of featured 
interlocutors, since he was especially helpful in 
the planning of this month's discussion and 
expressed his deep regrets about being unable to 
join us.

We have known Laura and Kevin and Jenn for many 
years, with Laura and Jenn having strong ties to 
our home, Ithaca, New York.   Recently we enjoyed 
sharing time in Pècs, Hungary, with Laura who 
spoke about her exciting thoughts on the fold and 
its relation to Islamic thought.  And we happened 
to bump into Kevin three weeks ago at the opening 
of Kevin and Jenn's new show at Postmasters in 
New York , which provides a stunning visual/video 
intervention of their artistic experience in Abu 
Dhabi.  Welcome all!

==================

TAREK ELHAIK
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. Keeping with the clinical etymology of the word
Curare, Curatorial Work is understood not only as the practice of film
or art programming but also as both a form of field-work and a
Deleuzian form of 'symptomatology' in contemporary regimes of living.
Tarek Elhaiks 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. He has been thinking and writing about those new media artists
and curatorial laboratories who act as contemporary diagnosticians and
symptomatologists of contemporary culture. He frames his own concept
of Curatorial Work as something that exceeds the profession associated
with curatorial practice and thinks of it more in the sense assigned
to it by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze: as a vocation of thinking and
reorganizing symptoms of contemporary cultures through a 'critical and
clinical' method. He has zoomed in on, for instance, on the complex
work of Moroccan artist Mounir Fatmi who draws extensively from
medical and neuroscientific visual culture to comment on the political
dimension of Islamic iconography, and has conducted fieldwork among
the Mexico City based curatorial laboratories Teratoma and Curare who
deploy oncological metaphors to activate forms of disorganization
within the sovereign national body politic of contemporary Mexico. He
is now working on a manuscript titled: Curatorial Work: Errant &
Incurable forms of life where he explores these affinities.

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.




-- 
Timothy Murray
Director, Society for the Humanities
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/
Curator, The Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Cornell Library
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
A. D. White House
27 East Avenue
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853
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