[-empyre-] July on empyre: Reclaiming creativity as agent of change

[Saul Albert]

Thanks for the intro Simon, and to everyone for the enjoyable scenic
tour of the issues raised so far.

On Sun, Jul 17, 2011 at 11:28:43PM +0100, Parikka J. wrote:
> I think the Critical Engineer is a good figure to thinking about the
> work of creativity in terms of the various ecologies to which we need
> to step into simultaneously - conceptual, technological,
> environmental, economic...as such, it is much more than the old list
> of key terms of media studies (identity, representation, etc.) and
> more in the vein of evil media studies. 

I'm up for working with the term 'Critical Engineering' as a lever for
continuing the discussion. But first I have to situate it, and myself
within the discussion so far - with apologies for brevity and omission.

Simon started us off with a question of how a 'pirate ethos' could
reclaim creativity from an increasingly marketised landscape of IP.

Shu Lea and Paulo Cirio looked at piracy through its contradictory
'means of association' from kingdom to republic, corporation to union.

Marc and Magnus Laurie stressed the borders and 'feral intensities' of
'vagrant' and contraband modes of piratical appropriation or vandalism.

Davin Heckman questioned the moral 'freedom to' and 'freedom from' this
kind of 'vandalism', which Marc re-cast through a class-conscious lens.

Jussi Parikka introduced the devious, fecund world of everything-spam,
to look at the pirate productivity drive and track it's 'evil' progress.

Michel Bauwens asked if autonomous practices can mitigate appropriation,
and Magnus Laurie pointed at 'soci-techi' Hackerspaces as exemplary.

Artists like Kate Rich (and her Feral Trade project) as well as some
others in the milieu Marc was obliquely referring to in his posts have
called themselves 'infrastructure artists': a usefully boring phrase.

Your description of the workshop in Lima, Julian, sounds like you're
taking a critical artistic approach to your materials in context. An Art
and Language workshop might have performed a similar auto-exegesis.

Having started a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science,
'Critical Engineering' sounds like an exciting oxymoron to me.

So how does a critical engineer deploy strategies of the object?

-- 
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