[-empyre-] Pier Marton's 1st Appearance on -empyre- Part 2

[Johannes Birringer]

Continued from Part 1
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In many ways things have not changed much since that 1994 text, except that now video is part of new media, the screens are everywhere, Skype and Facebook consolidate our mass-solitary-confinement in the ways predicted by Günther Anders (before Guy Debord).

Most of my art activities, often around video-art, dealt with “heavy topics”:  audience passivity, the Shoah, male violence, television indoctrination - and as Jon McKenzie brought up the term this morning, I directed the short performance piece “Telepathos," broadcast live on the Learning Channel with the artists Nancy Buchanan and Shalom Gorewitz.
For more than thirty years I have taught media production, often emphasizing self-reflexivity - that was the term back then -  and Brecht’s distancing effect. Now, six years after a form of brain reboot (a brain hemorrhage), I see the busyness of many of our concerns to be just “stuff.” There are important exceptions but they are rare: Joshua Oppenheimer’s recent film "The Act of Killing" is one such example.

Growing up with a father who was a well-known artist-photographer, I was surrounded by photographs and images; now, I am suspicious of them, even while I capture images of abstraction.

I still feel compelled to keep track of the news, as hard and violent as it is. 
Good news barely exists; subtlety and non-violent media take too much time, and they don’t sell.

For me the question that remains is whether there is something that can be done about the violence that surrounds us beyond being concerned, signing petitions, writing & doing artwork. 
I have no idea at this point but I am willing to try.
Pier Marton

P.S.: Si puedo hacerlo voy a escribir en español et j’essayerai autant que possible d’écrire en français aussi. Ha van valaki aki akarja holy magyarul irjak is, akkor meg probálom ugy is ini.


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Pier Marton
P.S.: Si puedo hacerlo voy a escribir en español, et j’essayerai autant que possible d’écrire en français aussi. Ha van valaki aki akarja holy magyarul is irjak, akkor meg probálom ugy is ini.
PM_uoʇɹɐɯ_ɹǝıd —> http://piermarton.info
School Of No  Media —> http://schoolofnomedia.com/
About —> http://about.me/piermarton 
BrainBleed—> http://brainbleed.wordpress.com/