[-empyre-] Fwd: empyre

[Renate Ferro]

Dear empyreans,
Welcome to September. We have had a break from -empyre soft-skin
discussions this past August and are ready to introduce the September
discussion but before we do I would like to take the opportunity to
announce changes to our moderating team,

Timothy Murray (US), Simon Biggs ( AU), and myself, Renate Ferro (US)
are pleased to welcome Selmin Kara (TR and CA) and Patrick Keilty (CA
and US).  I have included their biographies  below.

We also wish to thank Patrick Lichty who since April 2011 when he
introduced a discussion on " The Re-emergence of the Augment"  has
helped round out our moderating team. He has managed other discussions
since then including "Glitches, Cracked, and Dirty Media" in December
2011 and  "The New Aesthetics: Seeing Like Machines" in September
2012. We have valued his perspectives on the moderating team and thank
him.  We wish him the very best. We know he will remain an active
subscriber to the list serve and even a guest moderator when his
schedule permits.  We appreciate all your work Patrick.

Renate Ferro
Managing Moderator, -empyre soft-skinned space

Biographies: Welcome Selmin Kara and Patrick Keilty
Originally from Turkey, Selmin Kara is an Assistant Professor of Film
and New Media at OCAD University in Toronto, Canada. She has critical
interests in the use of new technologies, tactical media, and sound in
documentary, as well as post-cinematic aesthetics and new materialist
approaches in film. Her work has appeared and is forthcoming in
Studies in Documentary Film, Poiesis: A Journal of the Arts &
Communication, Sequence, the Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in
Digital Media, and Music and Sound in Nonfiction Film: Real Listening.
Selmin is currently co-editing an anthology on contemporary
documentary media and working on her book project Reassembling
Documentary: From Actuality to Virtuality, which proposes a new
materialist framework for understanding the sound and image
relationships in documentary in the age of networks.

Patrick Keilty is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Information
at the University of Toronto. His primary teaching and research field
is new media studies, with a particular focus on digital theory,
technology studies, visual culture, gender, sexuality, and critical
theory. He is co-editor of Feminist and Queer Information Studies
Reader (2013). His monograph project, provisionally titled Database
Desire, engages the question of how our embodied engagements with
labryinthine qualities of database design mediate aesthetic objects
and structure sexual desire in ways that abound with expressive
possibilities and new narrative and temporal structures. Recently, he
has published and presented his SSHRC-funded research on a wide
variety of topics, including embodiment and technology, algorithmic
display, the history of information retrieval, technology and
transformations of gendered labor, women in computing, design and
experience, compulsion and control, metadata and the creation of
fetishistic networks, new forms of sexual nomenclature as taxonomies
for navigating pornographic databases, and feminist and queer new
media and technoscience issues generally.