[-empyre-] week one - PRACTICE - introduction

[Ashley Scarlett]

*October 6-12*

*PRACTICE*

Much of the current and most pressing work on digital objects is being
taken up within professional and creative contexts through practice. In an
effort to ground a largely theoretical discussion on digital objects, and
furnish it with political and practical urgency, from October 6th-12th, we
would like to open with a conversation regarding encounters with and
impressions of digital objects “in the wild”. Of particular interest are
conversations regarding how digital objects are being encountered and
conceptualized within practices of: curation; exhibition; preservation;
archiving; and design. In addition to our overarching provocations, we will
explore such questions as:

·      Drawing upon your experience, how do you conceptualize digital
objects? How does this conceptualization fit into the work that you do?

·      How have historical, political, experiential, and ideological forces
factored into this definition of digital objects?

·      What consequences does this definition have within your line of
work/research? And more broadly?

·      How would you characterize your relation to and experience of
digital objects?

·      Why does a conversation concerning digital objects matter? What is
at stake in this conversation?



While we will hopefully make our way through each of these questions this
week, as well as other emergent ones – we would like to extend a special
invitation to the --empyre--soft_skinned_space community to share your own
“definitions” of digital objects. From your perspective, what kind of thing
is a digital objects?





*INVITED DISCUSSANT BIOS*

*Ange Albertini *is a reverse engineer, professional malware analyst,
developer, and author of http://www.corkami.com. Ange has been
experimenting with computer internals more than 20 years. More recently,
Ange has become interested in the visualization of digital objects,
attempting to document various binary file formats visually (current
 images can be found at pics.corkami.com). Additionally, Ange manually
crafts files to present particular characteristics by combining file
formats, compression and cryptography. Ange has been called a 'digital
alchemist' and a 'binary artist’ for his work in creating a valid PDF that
is also a valid TrueCrypt container, and a JPEG that encrypts with AES to a
PNG file which decrypts with 3-DES to a PDF file.

*Dragan Espenschied *(*1975 Germany) is a media artist, digital culture
researcher and 8-bit musician living in New York City. Starting out as a
net activist in the late 1990’s, he created several online interventions
concerned with digital power structures and live network traffic
analysis/manipulation together with Alvar
Freude.

In his artistic career, Espenschied focuses on the historization of Digital
Culture from the perspective of computer users rather than hackers,
developers or “inventors” and together with net art pioneer Olia Lialina
has created a significant body of work concerned with how to represent and
write a culture-centric history of the networked age.

Since 2011, he has been restoring and culturally analyzing 1 TB of
Geocities data, supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation.
Espenschied worked with the transmediale festival’s archive and the Vilem
Flusser Archive to conceptually and technically integrate large-scale
emulation while working as a researcher at the University of Freiburg and
the University of Applied Arts in
Karlsruhe.

Publications include papers on large-scale curation of complex digital
artifacts, emulation and digital culture, the influential reader Digital
Folklore as well as musical releases on Aphex Twin’s label Rephlex and
several underground/net labels, performing and lecturing in between raves
and museums in Europe and the United States. Since April 2014, he is
leading the Digital Art Conservation Program at Rhizome.

*Andres Ramirez Gaviria *Informed by processes of translation and
transference, and building on the forms, figures, and discourses of art,
design, and technology, Andrés Ramírez Gaviria’s work addresses such
disparate, even contradictory, notions as autonomy and communication.
Through the interaction of forms and connections, Gaviria’s work emphasizes
moments of discord and dialogue between the constantly changing perspective
of historical references and an experiential notion of the contemporary.

Andrés Ramírez Gaviria (born 1975 Bogotá) lives and works in Vienna,
Austria. His work has been exhibited in BA – CA Kunstforum, Vienna;
Kunsthaus Graz; Kunsthaus Dresden; Caribbean Biennial, Santo Domingo;
Galeria Vermelho, Sao Paulo; Arte Camara – ArtBo, Bogotá; the ARCO
International Contemporary Art Fair, Madrid; La Casa Encendida, Madrid;
Sonambiente, Berlin and Transmediale, Berlin.



*Kristie MacDonald* is a visual artist and archivist who lives and works in
Toronto, Ontario. She holds a BFA from York University specializing in
Visual Arts, and an MI from the University of Toronto specializing in
Archival Studies. MacDonald is currently a Candidate in the MFA (Visual
Arts) program at York University. She has recently exhibited her work at
the International Print Centre New York, Gallery 44, and Xpace Cultural
Centre.



As an archivist, MacDonald specializes in the areas of media perseveration
and collections management. Her research and writing is currently focused
on media art and archives within artist-run centres. She has been invited
to speak on these topics by organizations across Canada including Grunt
Gallery, the Association of Canadian Archivists, and the Independent Media
Arts Alliance. MacDonald is Acting Archivist at Vtape, and an independent
archival consultant. She has recently worked with the collections of YYZ
Artists’ Outlet, Video Pool Media Arts Centre, and SAW Video.



*Dani Robison *



*Hannah Turner* is a PhD Candidate in the Faculty of Information at the
University of Toronto, where she explores the inclusion and exclusion of
Indigenous knowledge in standard museum documentation practices. Her
dissertation research focuses on a history of documentation in the
Anthropology Department at the Smithsonian's National Museum of National
History, from the early catalogues to the contemporary database, to recent
applications in 3D printing. She is particularly interested in how museum
information architectures discursively construct Indigenous knowledge, and
how communities interact with objects that are digitally mediated.
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