[-empyre-] Fwd: Introducing September on empyre. Zones of Contact

[Renate Ferro]

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We continue to have server issues. This post was from yesterday. 
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> Hello to all empyre subscribers.  Tim and I have just arrived in Istanbul, Turkey where we will be meeting other empyre moderators Simon Biggs and Patrick Lichty plus all of you at ISEA.  We are planning an empyre get together in real time and space and will announce when and where hopefully early tomorrow. Here is the introduction for September. We are starting a little late this month because our website and moderator's site has been gravitated over to a new url. Thanks to all the cofa people for helping us to get back online. 
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>>>  2011 on –empyre- soft-skinned space:  Zones of Contact:  -empyre-Istanbul
>>> Moderated by Renate Ferro (US) and Tim Murray with Simon Biggs (UK), Patrick Lichty (US), and Cynthia Rubin (US)
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>>> Zones of Contact:
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>>> Istanbul, Turkey is the site of the Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts (ISEA) conference which clearly states its mission as “fostering interdisciplinary academic discourse and exchange among culturally diverse organizations and individuals working with art, science and emerging technology.” The seventeenth symposia of ISEA will run in Istanbul, Turkey from the 14th to the 21st of September, 2011.  Coinciding with the ISEA event is the twelfth Istanbul Biennial curated by Adrian Pedrosa, an independent curator based is Sao Paulo and Jens Hoffman a writer and curator based in San Francisco.  The biennial is dedicated to “create a meeting point in İstanbul in the field of visual arts between artists from diverse cultures and the audience.” Both venues will collide into zones of contact creating a convergent net for meetings, conversations and discussions cultural exchange and conceptual reflection.
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>>> Many subscribers will recall Tim’s curatorial project “Contact Zones: The Art of the CD ROM” http://contactzones.cit.cornell.edu/ for which his 1999 curatorial vision was inspired by Mary Louise Pratt’s use of the term contact zone in Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation [London: Routledge, 1992] where she refers to  "the space of colonial encounter, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict"  Using the word contact Pratt borrows from linguistic practice where improvisation among speakers of different languages within the context of trade results in the development of pidgins or creole language blends.  In his appropriation of the term, Tim understands the word contact to refer to both material and electric exchanges that that have been essential within the digital revolution. “Within these contexts are the points of energy generation and flow in electronic and computer circuits that sustain the digital interface across languages and geographies.”
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>>>  Just three months ago we visited the Venice biennial where political zones of contact were evident in several of the pavilions quite obviously Egypt, Iran and Iraq.  What kind of stage will ISEA and the Istanbul biennial present for its artists and how will those artists be received by the local and global zones of contact. This month we invite our guests and subscribers to engage critically with all zones of contact both local and global. 
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>>> This month on empyre we are interested in performing Zones of Contact between our empyre subscribers, both those online and those who find themselves within the real time spaces of ISEA and Istanbul. We want to take this opportunity to converge the real and the virtual by inviting the Turkish artists and others who we meet to reflect on the status of art and new media? How they feel about ISEA and the Istanbul Biennial?  What are their sources for ideas about what to produce as artists?  What are their thoughts about the art market and its relations to museums? About how new media fits into those systems or others? How is it a force in the art world in the context of global politic and the recording and preservation of culture?  
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>>> This month’s September, 2011 edition of –empyre “Zones of Contact is moderated by Renate Ferro (US) www.renateferro.net artist-conceptual/new media, Department of Art, Cornell University; and Tim Murray (US), Curator of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Cornell University with –empyre- moderators Simon Biggs (UK), Edinburgh College of Art | University of Edinburgh; and Patrick Lichty (US) Dept. of Interactive Arts & Media,
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>>> Columbia College, Chicago.  We also are happy to introduce our special guest, Cynthia Rubin (US). Cynthia will be introducing us to some Turkish artists who we will introduce as they join us throughout the next weeks.
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>>>  Biography:  Cynthia Rubin (US) Cynthia Beth Rubin is a visual artist working in 2D still imagery, inter-activity, animated images, and 3D imaging, who began experimenting with digital media in the early 1980’s. Trained as a painter, her work evokes cultural memories and the imagined past by intertwining photographic elements to create complex layers of representation and abstraction.
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> Rubin’s work has been exhibited and screened in such diverse venues as the Jewish Museum in Prague, and opening night of the both the San Francisco and the Boston Jewish Film Festivals, the Pandamonium Festival at the ICA in London, the Lavall Gallery in Novosibirsk, the DeLeon White Gallery in Toronto, and numerous editions of ISEA, ArCade and SIGGRAPH. Winner of the first award in New Media from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, she was recently awarded this grant for a third time. Other awards and residencies include the New England Foundation for the Arts, Videochroniques in Marseilles, CYPRES in Aix-en-Provence, and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture. She works independently and in collaboration, and most recently organized the Cultural Heritage Artists Project for the Orchard Street Shul in New Haven, Connecticut. 
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> Rubin is a native of Rochester, NY and holds degrees from Antioch College and the Maryland Institute, College of Art (BA and MFA). She has been on the faculty of Frostburg State College, Connecticut College, and the University of Vermont, and currently is affiliated with the Rhode Island School of Design. 
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>>> Week I;  September 11th 
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>>> Week II:  September 18th
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>>> Week III:  September 25th
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