[-empyre-] Welcome to the October Discussion:

Sun Oct 6 04:19:00 EST 2013

I just awoke from Zhuangzi’s Butterfly Dream into the “empyre”an, thanks to
Tim and Renate. Out of blissful “panic” since this is my first time to
encounter the empyrean, I come to see the world as a globe with my eyes.
The eye is in fact the eyeball which looks like a globe. Nietzsche once
said that men are “deeply immersed in illusions and in dream images;” and
“their eyes merely glide over the surface of things and see forms.”

I am tempted to open up the issue of rethinking of the eye/gaze in terms of
the ontological concept of “medium” before Tim Murrayan “reflecting on the
shifting ontologies of film, screen culture, and global media.” During next
week at Busan from Oct. 7-12, I hope I am able to observe how BIFF
Conference and Forum represent and demonstrate the “convergence of media.”

My basic understanding of the eye/gaze dichotomy is from Jacques Lacan who
suggests that the eye and the gaze is the split. The function of the eye is
to see, while the gaze deceives the eye. His autobiographical story of
“Petit-Jean” demonstrates that the gaze is outside in the object when the
subject sees with his eyes the thing-object out there. His classical tale
of Zeuxis and Parrhasios tells us the issue of “deceiving the eye”
(tromper-l'œil), i.e., “A triumph of the gaze over the eye.” In short, the
gaze deceives the eye from the invisible side of the light which is truth
but in veil. However, Lacan is interested in the “laying down of the gaze,”
“dompte-regard” or taming of the gaze.

This double gaze of deception/abandonment in the form of moving image
(camera eye) can represent the unconscious of the subject by revealing the
epistemological potentiality of the unconscious truth in analysis. I would
argue that the camera eye becomes a derivative manifestation of Lacanian
aesthetics of the gaze, the aesthetics which transforms itself from the
images of the hoop nets representing the unconscious to the topology of the
klein bottle representing a new way of projection which transgresses the
borderlands of the inside/outside region of the uncanny unconsciousness.
Your new young empyrean friend,
Youngmin

2013/10/5 Renate Ferro <rtf9 at cornell.edu>

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Tim Murray posted:
>        So one of the questions we'll be asking is how to understand the
> current moment of convergence.  I was at a
>        conference last weekend on comparative media and a very influential
> film scholar made a passionate claim that
>        cinema shares with literature the access to profundity in a way
> that "media" can't.  Although I can understand the
>        historical background of such a claim, I found it so curious in an
> age when profundity has been democratized,
>        stretched, challenged, and mobilized by interactive performance,
> mobile technologies, and cross-platform exhibition....
>
> ...Coco Fusco delivered a keynote lecture at a conference in Art History
> here at Cornell last night.  In a powerful juxta-position of examples she
> laid out an hour's worth of examples of Cuban citizens, mostly performance
> artists, who use the ubiquitous technologies  of cell phones (video capture
> most notably but certainly still photography via social media) to document
> their actions to expose the political machinery of that government.  There
> are no independent reporters working inside of Cuba only individual
> citizens who report from the inside out.  Many of these citizens including
> these performance artists she cited risk jail sentences for their political
> actions.  The documentation of their political acts through the use of the
> moving image and other social media tools sends their message which
> reverberates eventually through to main stream media news outlets (CNN,
> Huffingtonpost).  According to Fusco, the importance of the reliance of
> social media tools like Facebook on other countries including Iran to send
> vital information to the outside world should not be underestimated.
> Facebook consciously updates their site  during the midnight hours Iran
> time because information is so vital to that country during its waking
> hours.
>
> I am looking forward to attending the 18th International Busan Film
> Festival.  Recent ABC coverage of the festival
>
> http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory/busan-film-festival-opens-stars-talent-20454700
> touted its reputation to feature more independent, lesser known talents,
>
> "The Busan festival is known for discovering new talent and highlighting
> movies on the fringe of the global film industry."
>
> It is the tension between main stream cinema, independent cinema and the
> cross-platform exhibition dimensions especially those within the art world
> that I am hoping we can talk about during the  next month of our
> discussion. I'll write more later today.
>
> Renate
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Fri, Oct 4, 2013 at 6:21 PM, Timothy Conway Murray <tcm1 at cornell.edu>wrote:
>
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>> Welcome to October, everyone.  Renate and I really delighted to be
>> hosting this month's discussion on "Convergence: expanding time-based
>> media." We have guests who work widely across the disciplines and from
>> varying perspectives across the globe so are eager to see how things
>> develop.
>>
>> Our first guest will be Youngmin Kim who is one of Korea's leading
>> interdisciplinary scholars and on the organizing of the Busan International
>> Film Festival which, as Renate mentioned, has chosen the concept
>> "Convergence" for the conference framing the Festival.  Since Busan is
>> Asia's most prestigious film festival, it is exciting that it has opened
>> the doors to reflecting on the shifting ontologies of film, screen culture,
>> and global media.  I'm particularly keen to hear empyreans' thoughts on the
>> implications of the convergence of media in which the screen(s) is
>> ubiquitous, audiences are mobile if not virtual, and forms that used to be
>> distinct, from film and video to installation, interactive platforms,
>> listservs, animation, and digital sound and image convergence in recombined
>> forms.
>>
>> So one of the questions we'll be asking is how to understand the current
>> moment of convergence.  I was at a conference last weekend on comparative
>> media and a very influential film scholar made a passionate claim that
>> cinema shares with literature the access to profundity in a way that
>> "media" can't.  Although I can understand the historical background of such
>> a claim, I found it so curious in an age when profundity has been
>> democratized, stretched, challenged, and mobilized by interactive
>> performance, mobile technologies, and cross-platform exhibition.  I'll
>> expound on remarks that I'll be making at Busan in the following week, but
>> my sense is that the very convergence of technologies in the context of
>> global screen cultures challenges and complicates the very universalist
>> claim of profundity upon which my colleague relies.
>>
>> After Youngmin wakes up (6am his time), I'll look forward to his opening
>> thoughts.  Welcome to a new month on -empyre-.  We're looking forward to an
>> active discussion.
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> Tim
>> Director, Society for the Humanities
>> Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
>> Professor of Comparative Literature and English
>> A. D. White House
>> Cornell University
>> Ithaca, New York. 14853
>> ________________________________________
>> From: empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au [
>> empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] on behalf of Renate Ferro [
>> rtf9 at cornell.edu]
>> Sent: Friday, October 04, 2013 10:13 AM
>> To: soft_skinned_space
>> Subject: [-empyre-] Welcome to the October Discussion:
>>
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> empyre forum
>> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>>
>>
>>
>
>
> --
>
> Renate Ferro
> Visiting Assistant Professor of Art,
> (contracted since 2004)
> Cornell University
> Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office:  306
> Ithaca, NY  14853
> Email:   <rferro at cornell.edu <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/
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>

-- 
Youngmin Kim, Ph. D. in English
Professor of English, Dongguk University, Seoul, Korea
President (2012-3), ELLAK
Chair, 2013 International Conference Committee of ELLAK (English Langauge &
Literature Association of Korea)
Editor-in-Chief, JELL (Journal of English Language and Literature), an
Outstanding Journal Endowed by the National Research Foundation and the
Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/attachments/20131006/88658650/attachment.htm>