[-empyre-] Week 3 on empyre: thoughts about the first two weeks and moving on

[Timothy Conway Murray]

Gabriel,

It's interesting that your experience at Socine parallels my thoughts about the Bosun Festival.  You put it well that Bosun, apparently as with Socine, could have been more successful in integrating experimental medial approaches into its programming and discourse.  So that if convergence figured, as it did so prominently as the theme of the Festival Conference, it did so primarily as folded into the screen of more traditional cinema discourse.

It's very disconcerting that those organizations most committed to articulating and promoting artistic convergences have fallen on the budgetary chopping block.  Would you be willing to say more about the context and histories of Arte.mov, Prêmio Sérgio Motta, MIS-SP?

I suspect that Dale is experiencing an alternative and more robust approach to funding the arts.  Dale, could say something about this and what difference it's making for thinking convergence and alternative approaches to the screen arts?

Thanks so much,

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 Gabriel Menotti [gabriel.menotti at gmail.com]
Sent: Monday, October 21, 2013 9:41 AM
To: soft_skinned_space
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Week 3 on empyre: thoughts about the first two weeks and moving on

----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
Hello, Tim!

> So would you mind elaborating a little more specifically about
> the particular institutional contexts about which your thinking in Brazil.

Oh, sorry if I was unclear. I was referring mostly to academia and
academic forums. Particularly, I was thinking about Socine, the
biggest cinema/screen/film studies congress in the country, which is
fresh in my mind because I was participating of it two weeks ago. I
was hoping to see a more heterogeneous event, but it ended up very
traditional. The only working group *slightly* opened to convergence
(or issues of technology and culture) was the arts & cinema one.

I was presenting a paper about piracy and ended up in a panel with
someone doing statistical research on the participation of women in
the production of Brazilian features in the last 20 years. While there
could have been an interesting dialogue between our two projects, if
the panel was better planned and chaired, it ended up feeling simply
as the place where they throw the misfits. The point being: there is
not enough people working in certain areas to constitute productive
fields of academic dialogue and criticism.

On the other hand, it is interesting to notice how sometimes it is
non-academic events and institutions (like FILE) that work as
catalysts of thought, creating conditions for the displacement of
current research culture. Didi-Huberman, for instance, was brought to
Brazil for a lecture by the newly opened Rio Museum of Arts (MAR), and
this certainly played an important role in his recent surge of
popularity.

Such events have the conceptual freedom and necessary fundings to
propose new questions/ bring new people. It is a shame that lots of
them that were involved with arts & media were recently discontinued
due to cuts in cultural budgets (Arte.mov, Prêmio Sérgio Motta,
MIS-SP). FILE is one of the few in the area that survived - perhaps
because of its popularity with a wider public. Time will tell how
negative will be the effects of these cuts to the variety of research.

Best!
Menotti




2013/10/19 Timothy Conway Murray <tcm1 at cornell.edu>:
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Hi, Menotti,
>
> It's so nice to hear your voice back on -empyre- and to receive it from your home territory of Brazil.  It strikes me as extremely important that you situate the possibilities for or restrictions of convergence in relation to resources or institutions.  In some cultural contexts, it seems like minimal resources might have enhanced the possibility for and necessity for convergence (such as the Arte Povera movement, etc.).  So would you mind elaborating a little more specifically about the particular institutional contexts about which your thinking in Brazil.  Many of our readers, for instance, might associate Brazil with the FILE Festival in Sao Paulo, which historically has been known for celebrating the convergence of artistic medial practice.  Is FILE the exception or do you see FILE being held back economically, etc.?
>
> Best,
>
> Tim
>
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