[-empyre-] Introducing week 2

[Johannes Birringer]

good morning, to you all and week 2 starting up, 
and it's great to return to our roundtable and find Ana so very active and involved  – thanks to all the responses between speakers here, and welcome to others, who just came, like Maria Damon and Scott Rettberg. Maria your concern about racial and gender violence, ethnic and home exproprition, needs to be addressed, for sure; thus at some point issues of ethics and the law, or a discussion about what we mean by human rights, and nationhood/citizenship (and patriotism) under the sign of terror will be necessary.

May I join Alan in welcoming more guests to our round, please all continue, and thank you Jon McKenzie, Reinhold Görling, Yoko Ishiguro, Mine Kaylan, and Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos for joining up.

I will compose a small mix tape soon, reflecting on the weekend discussion;  guest bios below:

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*Jon McKenzie, 
Jon McKenzie is Director of DesignLab, a digital composition center, and Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, where he teaches courses in performance theory and new media. He is the author of "Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance" (Routledge 2001) and such articles as “Global Feeling: (Almost) All You Need is Love,” “Performance and Globalization,” and “Towards a Sociopoetics of Interface Design.” He is also co-editor of "Contesting Performance: Global Sites of Research" (Palgrave 2011). Jon has also produced a number of experimental video essays, including "The Revelations of Dr. Kx4l3ndj3r" (2012) and "This Vile Display" (2006), and gives workshops on performative scholarship and smart media. His work has been translated into a half-dozen languages.


*Reinhold Görling, 
Reinhold Görling is professor of media and cultural studies at Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf and works at the intersection between media philosophy, psychoanalysis, film and performative studies. He recently (2014) published “Szenen der Gewalt. Folter und Film von Rossellini bis Bigelow” (Scenes of Violence. Torture and film from Rossellini to Bigelow.). Besides image and violence, another research subject currently focusses Reinhold’s interest on time, play, and abstraction. 


*Yoko Ishiguro, 
Yoko Ishiguro is a performance maker, performer and actress. She studied Psycholinguistics in University of Tsukuba (Japan) and got her MA in Contemporary Performance Making at Brunel University London in 2012. Her background is contemporary theatre and dance. After her acting and dancing career, she started to make her solo works and has performed internationally since then. Mostly, her works are simple and playful site-specific performances (or performative installations) to problematise the urban social/communicational conditions which determine the relationships of people within, considering the accompanying cultural and ontological issues. Currently, Ishiguro works interdisciplinarily in Live Art, performance art, theatre and academic fields across Japan and the UK. Website:  http://ishiguroyoko.info/iroiro/


*Mine Kaylan, 
Mine Kaylan works as performance, visual theatre artist and writer. She teaches on the Performance and Visual Art programme at the University of Brighton. She is interested in ‘the cultural politics of live exchange’ and more recently has been exploring this subject through the 'lecture/performance' form and by making short films. She has been developing a ‘poetic documentary’ based on a series experiments with film poems and the Turkish destan form, as documentation of a 'poetics of liveness'. She continues to investigate the conundrum: how to combine a document of the live moment and the epic historic simultaneously, through a combination of word and moving image.


* Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos is Professor of Law & Theory at the University of Westminster, and founder and Director of The Westminster Law & Theory Centre, a centre that brings together radical interdisciplinary research. His research interests include environmental law, human rights, EU law, law and literature, law and space, continental philosophy, gender studies, law and art, and so on, all areas in which he has published. He lectures around the world and holds permanent professorial affiliations with the Centre for Politics, Management and Philosophy, Business School, Copenhagen since 2006, and the University Institute of Architecture, Venice since 2009. Andreas is also a practicing artist, working on photography, text and performance under the name of picpoet. His recent art publication is called “A fjord eating its way into my arm”, published by AND publishers, London. His academic books include the edited volumes Law and the City (2007), Law and Ecology (2011) Radical Encounters (2013), and the monographs Absent Environments (2007), Niklas Luhmann: Law, Justice, Society (2009) and the recent (2014) Spatial Justice: Body Lawscape Atmosphere. Forthcoming books include an edited collection by Springer called Space and Knowledge, as well as the Routledge Research Handbook on Law & Theory. 



peace,
Johannes Birringer