[-empyre-] -empyre- distribution
Laura Marks
lmarks at sfu.ca
Fri Feb 25 03:44:28 EST 2011
Horit, I don't have much of an answer for you. We've had some focused discussion on this list about activist art, on one hand, and the politics of access by artists from the middle east, on the other. They're different issues. My point about media art distribution addresses the second issue. Yes, it pales in light of the sublime political acts happening across the Arab world now.
One more point before I make myself thoroughly unpopular on this list: I wouldn't call what has happened in Tunisia and Egypt (let alone Bahrain and Libya) "Twitter revolutions" or "facebook revolutions." Decentralized media are just one ingredient in revolution.
Laura
----- Original Message -----
From: "horit herman peled" <horithp at gmail.com>
To: "soft_skinned_space" <empyre at gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
Sent: Wednesday, February 23, 2011 10:53:25 AM
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] -empyre- distribution
"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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