[-empyre-] Welcome to the April discussion on -empyre: Rethinking Curatorial Options, Globally

Mon Apr 2 12:00:04 EST 2012

Hello to all of our empyre subscribers. This month on empyre both Tim
and Renate will be moderating the following discussion.  We are
looking forward to this exchange and discussion. We will be adding
more guests to list in the next few days but we wanted to get started
on the 1st so here goes!

April, 2012 on -empyre- soft_skinned space
Rethinking Curatorial Options, Globally

Moderated by Renate Ferro (US) and Tim Murray (US) with Jennifer
Fisher (CA), Jim Drobnick (CA), Christiane Paul (US), Nate Hitchcock
(US), Naeem Mohaiemen (US), Calin Man (RO), Archiya Lokhandwala (IN),
Jolene Rickard (US, Tuscarora), Beryl Graham (UK), Calin Man (RO) and
more.

http://empyre.library.cornell.edu/

This month's focus will engage in a wide-range of approaches to new
media art and curating. Featured guests will introduce their
curatorial practices across a range of cultural traditions in order to
reflect on the impact of broad practices in video, locative media,
interactive and relational media, photography, sound, gaming and
installation on global reception.  How do curatorial and social
considerations impact the cultural, political, and theoretical
reception of artistic practice?  What role does positioning work
within the sanctioned spaces of museums and galleries or the
non-sanctioned public or personal spaces have on both artistic and
curatorial practice? How do global histories, customs, and politics
inform this positioning? What paradoxes or tensions present themselves
when the role of the curator and the artist are combined?  Finally,
how might artistic practice itself be understood as a curatorial
intervention in conceptual art?

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

Moderated by:

Renate Ferro (US) is a conceptual and new media artist working in
emerging technology, participatory installation, and digital culture.
She is the Managing Moderator of -empyre soft-skinned space. She has
recently staged participatory exhibitions and installations in Berlin,
Chiapas, Mexico, and Pécs, Hungary.  Her work will be featured in an
exhibition at the Freud Museum in London this September through
November of 2012. She teaches in the College of Architecture, Art, and
Planning at Cornell University in the areas of new media and
conceptual art.

 Tim Murray (US) is the Curator of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New
Media Art at Cornell University and is the Co-managing moderator of
-empyre-.  He is Director of the Society for the Humanities and
Professor Comparative Literature and English at Cornell.  He sits on
the Steering Committee of HASTAC and is the author of numerous books
and articles on new media, film and video, contemporary art,
performance, and theory, including Digital Baroque: New Media Art and
Cinematic Folds.

Featured guests:
Featured Guests, Biographies:
Week 1
Jennifer Fisher  (CA)
Jennifer Fisher is a curator and Associate Professor of Contemporary
Art and Curatorial Studies in the Department of Visual Art at York
University, Toronto. Her research focuses on exhibition practices,
performance, the visual arts, museums, collecting and the aesthetics
of the non-visual senses. Her writings have been featured in
anthologies such as Caught in the Act (2005) and The Senses in
Performance (2006), and journals such as Art Journal, Border/Lines,
n-paradoxa, Public, and Visual Communication. She is the editor of the
anthology Technologies of Intuition (2006).

Jim Drobnick (CA)
Jim Drobnick is a curator and Associate Professor of Contemporary Art
and Theory at OCAD University, Toronto. He has published on the visual
arts, performance, the senses and post-media practices in recent
anthologies such as Art, History and the Senses (2010) and Senses and
the City (2011), and the journals Angelaki, High Performance,
Parachute, Performance Research, and The Senses & Society, where he is
now reviews editor. His books include the anthologies Aural Cultures
(2004) and The Smell Culture Reader (2006).

Drobnick and Fisher recently launched the Journal of Curatorial
Studies, for which they are editors
(www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-Journal,id=205/).
They are the founding members of DisplayCult, a collaborative
framework for interdisciplinary studies in the visual arts. Its main
objective is to creatively merge disciplines, media and communities in
order to propose generative prototypes for display and aesthetic
engagement. Their exhibitions include NIGHTSENSE (2009), MetroSonics
(2009), Odor Limits (2008), Listening Awry (2007), Do Me! (2006),
Aural Cultures (2005), Linda Montano (2003), reminiSCENT (2003),
Museopathy (2001), Vital Signs (2000) and CounterPoses (1998), among
others. Their collaborative publications include the catalogues
CounterPoses (2002) and Museopathy (2002), as well as essays in
Trespassers & Captives (2000), Image and Inscription (2005), and
Dispersions: Aernout Mik (2005). www.displaycult.com

Week 2: TBA

Week 3:
Christiane Paul (US)
Christiane Paul is the Director of Media Studies Graduate Programs and
Associate Prof. of Media Studies at The New School, NY, and Adjunct
Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She
has written extensively on new media arts and lectured internationally
on art and technology. Her recent books are Context Providers –
Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts (Intellect, 2011), co-edited with
Margot Lovejoy and Victoria Vesna; New Media in the White Cube and
Beyond (UC Press, 2008); and Digital Art (Thames and Hudson 2003;
expanded new edition 2008). At the Whitney Museum, she curated the
shows “Cory Arcangel: Pro Tools” (May 2011), "Profiling" (2007), and
“Data Dynamics” (2001); the net art selection for the 2002 Whitney
Biennial; the online exhibition "CODeDOC" (2002) for artport, the
Whitney Museum’s online portal to Internet art for which she is
responsible; as well as "Follow Through" by Scott Paterson and
Jennifer Crowe (2005). Other recent curatorial work includes "Eduardo
Kac: Biotopes, Lagoglyphs and Transgenic Works" (Rio de Janeiro,
Brazil, 2010); Biennale Quadrilaterale (Rijeka, Croatia, 2009-10);
"Feedforward - The Angel of History" (co-curated with Steve Dietz;
Laboral Center for Art and Industrial Creation, Gijon, Asturias,
Spain, 2009-2010) and INDAF Digital Art Festival (Incheon, Korea, Aug.
2009).

Nate Hitchcock (US_
b. 1985, graduated from the School of the Art
Institute of Chicago in 2008. He is the founder and director of Apache
Projects open source project site in Mother Neff State Park, Moody,
Texas. He specializes in New Media, Internet and screen based art. His
practice merges new display and installation methods with off-site locations.
His research is interested in the function and non-function of
technology, nature and territories in  globalized communities."

Naeem Mohaiemen (US)
Naeem Mohaiemen uses essays, photography, and film to explore
histories of the international left, hyphenated migrant identities,
and utopia-dystopia slippage. His work as part of Visible Collective
was a series of database sculptures, event timelines, and public
seminars which traveled internationally, including the Whitney
Biennial of American Art (in Wrong Gallery) and L'Institut de Islam,
Paris. Since 2006, he has been working on The Young Man Was, a
research project about the 1970s ultra-left. Publications include
Chittagong Hill Tracts in the Blind Spot of Bangladesh Nationalism,
Collectives in Atomised Time (w/ Doug Ashford, Idensitat Press) and
System Error: war is a force that gives us meaning (w/ Lorenzo Fusi,
Silvana). Essays include " Islamic Roots of HipHop" (Sound Unbound,
MIT Press), "Everybody Wants To Be Singapore" (Carlos Motta: The Good
Life, Art in General), "Asterix and the Big Fight " (Playing by the
rules, Apex Art Journal), and "Why Mahmud Can’t Be a Pilot" (Nobody
Passes: rejecting the rules of gender and conformity, Seal Press).

Calin Man (RO)
b.: 1961; place of residence: Arad, Romania.
education: B.A. in literature, Timisoara University, Romania;
chief-editor and designer of intermedia magazine; member of kinema ikon group.
curator for kinema ikon projects. net.works and digital installations
exhibited at various important new media shows (i.e. Venice Biennial,
Sao Paulo Biennial, FILE, Centre G. Pompidou, Contact Zones: The Art
of the cd-rom).

Week 4:
Arshiya Lokhandwala (IN)
Arshiya Lokhandwala is an art historian, curator and founder of
Lakeeren Art Gallery (1995–2003) in Mumbai, India. She completed her
BA and MA in Sociology in 1986 and 1991 respectively. She is the
recipient of the Charles Wallace India Trust award in 2001 for an MA
in Creative Curating at Goldsmiths College, London. She was a
participant at the Documenta 11 Education program in Kassel in 2002,
under the artistic curator Okwui Enwezor. She is also a curatorial
committee member of the Arts Pension Trust. Lokhandwala curated
Rites/Rights/Rewrites: Women’s Video Art, which traveled to Cornell
University, Duke University, and Rutgers University from 2003–06. She
is currently a PhD candidate in the History of Art department at
Cornell University, under Salah Hassan, and writes on the
globalization of art, feminism, performance art and new media.

Jolene Rickard ( US, Tuscarora)
Jolene Rickard, Ph.D. is a visual historian, artist, and curator
interested in the issues of Indigeneity within a global context. She
is the Director for the American Indian Program at Cornell University,
an associate professor in the History of Art and Visual Studies and
Art Departments. Recent essays include “Visualizing Sovereignty in the
Time of Biometric Sensors,” in The South Atlantic Quarterly:
Sovereignty, Indigeneity, and the Law, 110:2, Spring 2011, “Skin Seven
Spans Thick,” in Hide: Skin as Material and Metaphor, NMAI: DC, 2010,
“Absorbing or Obscuring the Absence of a Critical Space in the
Americas for Indigeneity: The Smithsonian's National Museum of the
American Indian,” in RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 52, Autumn,
2007, and Rebecca Belmore: Fountain by Jolene Rickard and Jessica
Bradley, Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery and Kamloops Art Gallery,
Canada, 2005.
Recent projects include; Consultant to the National Gallery of
Canadian Art in preparation for an international survey of Indigenous
art in 2013, also identified as the first Quinquennial (Ottawa), a
participant in the Cornell/Duke 54th Venice Biennale Dialogue (Italy)
2011 and she was a co-curator for the inaugural exhibition for the
Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (Washington,
D.C.) 2004.
Jolene is from the Tuscarora Nation territories in western New York.

Beryl Graham (UK)
Beryl Graham is senior research fellow at the School of Art, Design
and Media, University of Sunderland, and co-editor of the CRUMB Web
site resource for curators of new media art . She is a writer, curator
and educator with many years of professional experience as a media
arts organizer, and was head of the photography department at Projects
United Kingdom, Newcastle, for six years. She curated the
international exhibition Serious Games for the Laing and Barbican art
galleries, and has also worked with The Exploratorium, San Francisco,
and San Francisco Camerawork.
Her PhD concerned audience relationships with interactive art in
gallery settings, and she has written widely on the subject for books
and periodicals including Leonardo, Convergence, and Switch. Her book
Digital Media Art was published by Heinemann in 2003, and she has
chapters in the books The Photographic Image In Digital Culture
(Routledge) and Fractal Dreams (Lawrence and Wishart). Beryl has
presented papers at conferences including Navigating Intelligence
(Banff), Museums and the Web (Seattle), and Caught in the Act (Tate
Liverpool).

--

Renate Ferro
Visiting Assistant Professor of Art
Cornell University
Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office #420
Ithaca, NY  14853
Email:   <rtf9 at cornell.edu>
URL:  http://www.renateferro.net
      http://www.privatesecretspubliclies.net
Lab:  http://www.tinkerfactory.net

Managing Co-moderator of -empyre- soft skinned space
http://empyre.library.cornell.edu/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyre