[-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 107, Issue 15

Wed Oct 30 17:39:44 EST 2013

Hi everyone,
My first comment is in reference to the last Dale Hudson post in relation to convergence across disciplines: practices using rhizomatic and nomadic spaces, operating across mobile networks, some perhaps drawing upon models of pre-digital collaborative research, at times based in embodied knowledge. 

As an artist, I think of the question of being ‘based’ within communities, institutions, cities, or even continents. Perhaps spurred by my own relocations from being based in Sarajevo, Chicago, Sharjah, to now being based in New York - I recognize the corporeal aspect to sustaining practice (since in my opinion practice is contingent on expanded social work)… even if involved in networked activity, or in relation to belonging - the term transnational is being used of recent.

Then, I also think of spaces (here is an example of one outside of a corporation or a university) like Metalab, a hackerspace in Vienna, Austria, where programmers gather and work on projects, often sharing information and their scripts with one another, collaborating on projects, or solving programming problems through collective efforts. Having met a few friends that work out of this space, they mention how integral gathering within the lab can be, especially in relation to knowledge sharing or the distribution of tasks. 

Malcom Levy mentioned “digital-analog space”

tangent:
In relation to peopled places : I have been thinking about cooking in art practice. Cooking, food and eating, as a site for negotiating with disembodiment. My feeling is that when moving through places food can be the device through which we establish relationships with our surroundings, but also the embodied memory that informs us about the place we have departed from. I have found cooking and eating to be a compelling format for relational activity and discursive exchanges in my own practice as a performer. 
What about being of a place, and of a time?

Isak Berbic

On Sunday, October 20, 2013 8:46 AM, Dale Hudson <dale.hudson at nyu.edu> wrote:

----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
Hi all.

I've been enjoying the various threads of discussion — Renate on thinking "in addition to" the visual, Menotti on the challenges of resources and theories in different locations, Tim on bringing together differing traditions to preform kinds of theoretical/cultural/artistic convergence, Sean on a need to mod critical paradigms — all of which seem to address similar concerns on how to think about different types of convergence.

I'm very interested to hear more from Menotti on projects in Brazil.  There are various events in Abu Dhabi that try to encourage convergence across disciplines.  People come from everywhere to compete in competitions here, as well as in ones hosted in eastern Europe, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa.  Most of the projects rely upon what might be called the rhizomatic and nomadic spaces of capital/corporations/military in the sense that they operate across mobile networks or the Internet.  Many of these projects do use open-source software, but what I noticed was that there is a willingness (sometimes by choice; other times, by the absence of choice) to work within the intellectual paradigms presupposed by these technologies.

Just like cameras presuppose a particular notion of vision, these distributed networks also presuppose a particular notion of knowledge, I think, though I would be happy to hear what others think.  The questions posed by these projects, however, are usually very interesting and sometimes work alongside rather than merely against a "standard" paradigm.  Many of them draw upon models from pre-digital collaborative research (questioning what "counted" as knowledge; intervening in daily life to produce new knowledge that might be embodied, for example); others, more squarely within digital humanities (automated research to recalibrate understandings of something).

In any case, a few thoughts after a full day of teaching and meetings.  I'd be happy to hear thoughts on such questions, including references to previous threads on empyre that I might have missed over the past few years, which have been occupied with starting up campus.

Best,
Dale

On Oct 20, 2013, at 5:00 AM, <empyre-request at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au> <empyre-request at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au> wrote:

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> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> 
> Today's Topics:
> 
>   1. Re: Week 3 on empyre: thoughts about the first two weeks and
>      moving on (Timothy Conway Murray)
>   2. Coming back to Sean Cubitt (Timothy Conway Murray)
> 
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Message: 1
> Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2013 21:16:59 +0000
> From: Timothy Conway Murray <tcm1 at cornell.edu>
> To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Week 3 on empyre: thoughts about the first two
>     weeks and moving on
> Message-ID:
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>     
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="Windows-1252"
> 
> 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
> 
> 
> 
> 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: Friday, October 18, 2013 10:22 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----------------------
> Hey, empyre!
> 
> Thanks for the intro, Renate. It is quite pleasing to participate of
> the list in the much more comfortable position of a guest. =)
> 
> Following Dale?s comments about venues and events in Delhi/Mumbai that
> foster convergence of practices, I could talk a bit about my recent
> experience, having returned to Brazil after a four-year season as a
> PhD candidate in London. Still suffering from academic jet lag, some
> challenges within local universities, research councils and seminars
> become very clear.
> 
> Somewhat, the precariousness of local institutions plays against
> convergence. In the context of arts & humanities, the general lack of
> resources (books, equipment, funding - and time to work!) seems to
> result in much more homogenous projects, repeating similar formulas,
> topics and bibliography. Besides the demands of productivity and
> accountability, I believe one of the reasons for this streamlining of
> the field is the very honest desire to find intellectual interlocution
> - common, reliable bases for dialogue. It can feel quite alienating to
> be the only one in a whole field dealing with a particular
> bibliography or theme, having no one to talk to. We invest time and
> attention in authors and schema that allow us to communicate with our
> peers.
> 
> Thus, theory moves slowly, in well-established fads, trailing after
> what happens in North America and Europe (mostly France). The most
> recent ones are Ranci?re and Didi-Huberman, who are being mentioned in
> virtually every national debate about moving image. There seems to be
> both insecurity and cautiousness in this development, a kind of fear
> of walking with one?s own steps and suddenly finding divergences from
> norms set abroad, risking putting into question the rigid hierarchies
> scientific authority relies upon.
> 
> (It?s funny how this creates certain distortions of perception. For a
> long time, Vil?m Flusser ? who lived, worked and taught in Brazil for
> a long time ? felt too foreign. When I moved to London, I made the
> mistake of changing all my main references to match the British
> edition of ?Towards a Philosophy of Photography?, ignorant of the fact
> that Portuguese was more of a working language for the author, and the
> Brazilian version of the book is actually more up to date.)
> 
> Best!
> Menotti
> 
> 
> 2013/10/17 Renate Ferro <rtf9 at cornell.edu>:
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>> Tim and I have returned to the US after an intense and productive time at the Busan Film Festival.  It was wonderful to see Youngmin and Alex in real time in both Busan and Seoul.  The Asian perspective on convergence is one that I feel we have only begun to flush out. Thank you Alex for teasing out some of the cultural complications involving this fact.  This was evident for me not only at Busan's film festival but in meeting many of my former students who despite a critical fine arts education at Cornell have transitioned over to their home in Korea where most of them work in very large commercial design firms. It appears to me that this spirit in celebration of capitalism as opposed to a suspicion (that particularly western academics and artists) stems from a desire and necessity for South Korea to assert itself from its neighbor to the North,  communist North Korea. I am thinking though about how other parts of Asia may weigh in on this.
>> 
>> Week three brings to us three guest moderators:  Dale Hudson, Gabriel Menotti and Ken Feingold.  Dale now teaching in the United Arab Emerites has been a guest on -empyre previously so many of you may know him.  Dale used to teach at our neighboring institution Ithaca College and we do miss seeing him around town.  Gabriel Menotti long-time empyreans will recognize.  Menotti was a part of a moderating team a few years ago.  We welcome him back as a guest and look forward to his contribution.  We also welcome Ken Feingold this month a new contributor to -empyre. Biographies are below.
>> 
>> Dale Hudson (UAE/USA) is a media theorist, critic, and curator.  He teaches film and new media studies at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD), curates online exhibitions for the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF), and serves on the preselection committee for the Abu Dhabi Film Festival (ADFF).  His work appears in journals including Afterimage, American Quarterly, Cinema Journal, French Cultural Studies, Journal of Film and Video, Screen, and Studies in Documentary Film, as well as in anthologies.  His book-in-progress, ?Blood, Bodies, and Borders,? analyzes transnational and postcolonial vectors of U.S. history through the political economies of film.  He has also reviewed films, exhibitions, and books for journals including Afterimage, African Studies Review, Jadaliyya, and Scope.
>> 
>> Gabriel Menotti (Brazil, 1983) Gabriel Menotti is an independent curator and lecturer in Multimedia at the Federal University of Esp?rito Santo (UFES). He is the author of Atrav?s da Sala Escura (Intermeios, 2012), a history of movie theatres from the perspective of VJing spaces. Menotti holds a PhD in Media & Communications from Goldsmiths (University of London), and another from the Catholic University from S?o Paulo. He has published work in a number of research journals and books, as well as contributed to international events such as the S?o Paulo Biennial, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid and the Transmediale Festival.
>> 
>> Ken Feingold (USA, 1952) received his B.F.A. and M.F.A. degrees in ?Post-Studio Art? from California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA.  He has been recognized as an innovator in the field of interactive art after fifteen prior years of making films, video art, objects, and installations. His early interactive works include The Surprising Spiral (1991), JCJ Junkman (1992), Childhood/Hot & Cold Wars (1993), and where I can see my house from here so we are (1993-95) among others.  His work Interior (1997) was commissioned for the first ICC Biennale '97, Tokyo; S?ance Box No.1 was developed while in residence at the ZKM Karlsruhe during 1998-99, and Head (1999-2000) was commissioned by the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki for the exhibition "Alien Intelligence" (Feb-May 2000). Since 2000 he has developed a body of ?cinematic sculptures? - objects and installations which include artificially intelligent animatronics and, frequently, moving
 images. He has taught mov
> ing image art at Princeton University and Cooper Union, among others, and he is also a licensed psychoanalyst in private practice. His works are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, NY; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Kiasma, Helsinki; ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, and others.
>> 
>> 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>
>> URL:  http://www.renateferro.net
>>      http://www.privatesecretspubliclies.net
>> Lab:  http://www.tinkerfactory.net
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ------------------------------
> 
> Message: 2
> Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2013 21:32:45 +0000
> From: Timothy Conway Murray <tcm1 at cornell.edu>
> To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
> Subject: [-empyre-] Coming back to Sean Cubitt
> Message-ID:
>     <338FF2A47233C34B9DC167AAA91534C20F4EEDAC at CH1PRD0411MB442.namprd04.prod.outlook.com>
>     
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
> 
> Sean,
> 
> I'm sorry that our travels back from Korea have delayed my response to your very interesting post of last week.  Although I'm the one who seemed inadvertently to catalyze a dialectical distinction between spectacle and politics, I did so simply to highlight an observation about the programming at Busan.
> 
> We're hoping that empyreans will pick up on the threads in the past two weeks to dialogue on your important point about developing practices of media arts that derive from emergent cultural configurations (you mention Indignados/Occupy, from the Mediterranean, from indigenous movements around the world) as well as from more 'conventional' theoretical ones, such as Menotti's mention of the Brazilian infatuation with Ranci?re and Didi-Huberman (although he mentioned this in passing so I'm uncertain of the context of this infatuation -- since I don't see the French visual theorist Didi-Huburman, coming much more from art history as part of this mix).  
> 
> While I personally am very comfortable with bringing these differing tradiitons in dialogue with one another (indeed, some would say it's almost impossible not to), I'm wondering if the particular alternative practices in Abu Dhabi mentioned by Dale doesn't perform precisely this kind of theoretical/cultural/artistic convergence (the apparent lack of which stimulated my initial response to the Busan Festival).
> 
> 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 Sean Cubitt [sean.cubitt at unimelb.edu.au]
> Sent: Monday, October 14, 2013 4:26 AM
> To: soft_skinned_space
> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 107, Issue 10
> 
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> 
> 
> 
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> 
> End of empyre Digest, Vol 107, Issue 15
> ***************************************

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