[-empyre-] Welcome to the October Discussion:

[Timothy Conway Murray]

From: Youngmin Kim <yk4147 at gmail.com>
Date: 2013/10/6
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Welcome to the October Discussion:
To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>




Dear Youngmin,

We are very honored to be joined by such a distinguished Korean intellectual as yourself.  The -empyre- community has a long history of international dialogue, having been established over a decade ago by Melinda Rackham in Australia, where we continue to rely on server space at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales.  We are very committed to expanding our Asian subscriber and participant base and are excited that your participation marks new progress in this direction.

When we gather this week in Busan to discuss the convergence of media, I anticipate that we will have the opportunity to discuss whether or not the Continental focus on the "gaze" continues to provide an adequate framework for thinking about the intersections of medial screens.  There's been much discussion about video art, for example, in relation to the disorienting work of the "glance" and "side vision."  Similarly a regular participant on -empyre-, Jordan Crandall has written eloquently about the new culture of "scansion" and surveillance through which the visual is embedded in digital culture and its surrounds.  This is just the tip of the iceberg, on which I hope our community will expand in the coming days.

The issue, for me, is not whether the psychoanalytical paradigm remains helpful, but rather, how it might be rewritten by the convergences of medial culture, perhaps more akin to what the French psychoanalyst J-B Pontalis calls "the visual" along the lines of vision scanned, glanced, looped, morphed and pixellated.

Looking forward to the discussion, and see you on Tuesday in Busan.

tim 


From: Youngmin Kim <yk4147 at gmail.com>
Date: 2013/10/6
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Welcome to the October Discussion:
To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
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


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 Youngmin Kim [yk4147 at gmail.com]
Sent: Saturday, October 05, 2013 1:19 PM
To: soft_skinned_space
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Welcome to the October Discussion:

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