[-empyre-] -empyre- distribution

Thu Feb 24 05:53:25 EST 2011

"It seems to me the problem is balancing access to the work and compensation
to the artist"

 Please explain, if you can, refereeing to the unbelievable historical
events unfolding in the ME empowered by media technologies.

Horit

On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 12:00 PM, Laura Marks <lmarks at sfu.ca> wrote:

> On the distribution issue I've mentioned: It's very difficult to get access
> to "films" and videos from the Middle East, as all of us complain who write
> on the subject (e.g. Lina Khatib in her recent book on Lebanese cinema).
> This is especially so in the case of experimental works that are on the
> border between cinema and gallery venues.
>
> A few such artists distribute their work with Heure Exquise!, Lowave, Arab
> Image Foundation, Arab Film Distribution, Third World Newsreel, and Video
> Data Bank. Others self-distribute (this includes placing works for sale at
> the Virgin Megastore in Beirut). Others publish their work on YouTube and
> Vimeo. Others through galleries. Then there are those great compilation DVDs
> such as the Résistances series from Lowave--though I note, old-fashionedly
> perhaps, that these are so cheap because they don't include public
> performance rights.
>
> It seems to me the problem is balancing access to the work and compensation
> to the artist. Though maybe most people now believe all media art should be
> free? I hope you can help me out here.
>
> 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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-- 
http://www.horit.com
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