[-empyre-] Thanks to Week 1 guests and ushering in the featured guests of week 2: Critical Making in International Networks

Fri Apr 11 07:29:40 EST 2014

hi, Tim, thank you for invitation. here is a short story about my
recent work....

Ready Media Files

at the start of the nineties, while Romanian society was still under
the regime of a retrograde communist mentality, I collaborated with
the group kinema ikon on a video installation which sought to
(ironically) dismantle the manipulative strategies of the national
media. the national TV station newscast was our source of video
content
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXUTEJ0Pj8E)
Ready Media was the term we used back then to describe the work. while
its use has been historicized, and more broadly applied in the years
since, I have recently reconsidered its implications in the making of
my work, and in the exhibitions that I have organized alongside.

the computer is, I like to believe, a new Dada "hat" where words mix
and compose themselves into another random poem
a Ready Media piece builds itself up, and works its way toward an
unpredictable target or goal. my involvement is in establishing, or
provoking the context around the operations of this system. to give a
few examples:
*. reVoltaire at veNietzsche (2003-2013)
comprised of all the recordings made by the surveillance camera
installed in the Romanian pavilion at the Venice biennial in 2003; the
result was
- a film with variable duration
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qGqx0Osx_8)
and an interactive online piece
http://revoltaire.net/venietzsche

*. 5 Ready Media Files by Vasile Carlova (2012)
the film juxtaposes an idiosyncratic movie soundtrack produced by
Rodion GA (a Romanian experimental new wave band from the seventies)
with film footage produced by an amateur cinematographer from the same
period
http://revoltaire.net/carlova/

*. Fifty Mississippi (2013) (kinema ikon: series/ season 1/ episode 1)
the exhibition expanded upon the Ready Media concept, by laying out
objects side by side according to the classical i.e. historic ready
made model
- http://revoltaire.weebly.com/les-objets.html
as well as through the remix of the movie, The Maltese Falcon -
http://revoltaire.weebly.com/les-films.html
and especially through the 10 books that almost entirely wrote
themselves http://revoltaire.weebly.com/les-livres.html

since 2012, kinema ikon has been working inside its white cube, in a
dedicated space at the art museum of arad, transylvania, romania -
where I have been coordinating the group's exhibitions. the project
that is currently underway, and has thus far received enthusiastic
feedback and response, is titled: kinema ikon: the series. the first
season comprises of 10 episodes, each produced by an individual member
of the group. the season began in october and will finish in may with
the publication of a catalogue and a dvd.
as the curator of this series, I see the individual episodes as pieces
of a puzzle, where each piece is a stand-in for its author, who in
turn brings in other pieces - which in this case are represented by
their own work. I am thus looking at a puzzle with an outcome / end I
cannot predict
http://kinema-ikon.net
more about the series:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/kinema-ikon/108409916620?ref=hl

around 1860, Titu Maiorescu, the founder of the intellectual movement
Junimea (which brought recognition to some of the most important
authors in Romanian literature - the modern Classics), was
passionately pursuing his studies in Vienna. he savored the fact that
he was considered particularly studious - even when at rest, he would
sit or position himself so that anyone entering his room would feel as
if they interrupted a profoundly meditative moment. similarly, I
habitually sit in from of my computer, giving off the impression that
I am working on something highly important, while in fact I would much
rather use an app that would have written a better text than mine.

calin man

On Thu, Apr 10, 2014 at 6:30 AM, Timothy Conway Murray <tcm1 at cornell.edu> wrote:
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> We want to extend our deepest thanks to the guests for the opening week of April's discussion of Critical Making in International Networks.  Marcus Bastos, Diana Taylor, Kevin Franklin, Daniel Herwitz, and Kevin Hamilton have gotten us off to a great start in contemplating the broad parameters of "Critical Making in International Networks."  Thanks to your posts and reflections; your emphases on global concerns of indigenous cultures, making through digital recycling, performance, and networked state and cultural relations have gotten off to a very strong start with .
>
> This week we will be welcoming Calin Man (Romania), an amazing artist and cultural activist whom Tim first curated in his 1999 CD-Rom exhibition, Contact Zones.   Joyce Rudinsky and Victoria Szabo collaborate as artistic and digital makers on a North Carolina project they will display at HASTAC PERU.  We're also hoping that Denisa Kera from Singapore will find the ability to post on the maker and hacker scenes in Shenzhen, China, which she is now exploring.  They are joined by two leading figures in the international digital humanities: Dan O'Donnell (Canada) who leads Global Outlook::Digital Humanities, a collaborative of digital humanists, and Michael Simeone who first visited us at Cornell in the company of Kevin Franklin when they collaborated together at Illinois before Michael moved last year to run his important lab for digital humanities and transdisciplinary informatics at Arizona State.
>
> Welcome to you all; we're so looking forward to hearing your thoughts.
>
> Bios:
>
> Calin Man (Romania) is chief-editor and designer of Intermedia Magazine, Curator at the Art Museum Arad, and a member of kinema ikon group.  His net.art works, experimental films and interactive installations have been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, Centre Pompidou, São Paulo Art Biennial, FILE São Paulo, EMAF Osnabrück, ISEA Liverpool, ISEA Paris, Cornell University NY, d>art Sydney, WRO Media Art Biennale.
>
> Daniel O'Donnell teaches in the English Department at the University of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada.  He is Director of the Digital Medievalist Project, a pioneering online scholarly community; Chair and CEO of the Text Encoding Initiative, the organization responsible for publishing and maintaining the widely used XML standard for digital humanities research; Chair of the Electronic Edition Advisory Board of the Medieval Academy of America; and a member of the Executive Board of the international collaborative, Global Outlook::Digital Humanities.
>
> Joyce Rudinksy (US) teaches media production in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina and serves on the Steering Committee of HASTAC.  She is also the Associate Director for the Digital Arts and Humanities Initiative at UNC's Institute for the Arts and Humanities, and former domain scientist for the arts and humanities at the Renaissance Computing Institute.  In 2010, she spearheaded the founding of the now annual CHAT Festival, which celebrates collaborations between triangle-area academics and the local tech industry.   Her work centers on how interactive technologies changes our perceptions; she's worked on a number of electronic art projects which utilize both gaming technologies and interactive sensors to explore how technology mediates and impacts our everyday experience.
>
> Michael Simeone (US) directs the IHR Nexus Lab for Digital Humanities and Transdisciplinary Informatics at Arizona State University, a project aimed at bringing together humanities, digital humanities, and other disciplines areound a common interest in something roughly understood as "data science." This emergent research lab will use digital and computational technologies to significantly expand the scale and depth of research in the humanities, such as curating large social and cultural data collections. The lab also will comprise new teams that address multidisciplinary questions involving the humanities and sciences.  Michael previously was at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he served as the Associate Director of the Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (I-CHASS) at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). During his tenure at I-CHASS, Michael launched and organized a number of research programs, such as the Institute for Advanced Topics in Digital Humanities, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
>
> Victoria Szabo (US) teaches courses in media history, computational media, information science + studies, and digital humanities theory/practice at Duke University. She is the Program Director for ISIS, which offers Undergraduate and Graduate Certificates. Her primary research focus is on the critical and practical affordances of database-driven spatial media such as digital maps, games and virtual worlds, and mobile applications for narrative use in teaching, research, artistic expression, and public outreach. She has co-developed augmented reality and game-based "digital city" projects in/for Durham, NC, Vancouver, BC, and Venice, Italy. She also does digital artwork with the Psychasthenia Studio art collective, and is an active member of ACM SIGGRAPH with whom she has curated exhibitions themed on information aesthetics and on the idea of "scale."
>
>
> Timothy Murray
> Professor of Comparative Literature and English
> Director, Society for the Humanities
> http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/
> Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media
> http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu
> A D White House
> Cornell University,
> Ithaca, New York 14853
>
>
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