[-empyre-] Welcome to our June topic on -empyre: Plant Art and New Media

[Renate Terese Ferro]

Welcome Natasha Myers and thank you for joining our -empyre moderating
team members Selmin Kara, and Patrick Keilty for the June discussion on
-empyre soft-skinned space,"Plant Art and New Media².  This
cross-disciplinary topic will bring together those interested in art,
science, popular culture, philosophy and anthropology to examine the
dynamics between culture and nature.  We look forward to a topic that
tests the grounds for discussions between human and nonhuman, and organic
and machinic life. Natasha, Selmin and Patrick will be introducing this
topic shortly as well as this month¹s guests but I did want to thank them
for organizing the monthly topic. We all look forward to it.

Happy June to all 
Renate

Natasha Myers is Associate Professor of Anthropology at York University,
the Director of the Plant Studies Collaboratory, Convenor of the Politics
of Evidence Working Group, and co-organizer of Toronto's Technoscience
Salon. Her anthropological research examines forms of life in the arts and
biosciences. She is the author of Rendering Life Molecular: Models,
Modelers and Excitable Matter (Duke, 2015), and has published articles on
modes of embodiment, the senses, and affects in the life sciences
indifferences, Social Studies of Science, Science Studies, and edited
volumes. Her recent research examines the arts and sciences of botanical
experimentation, the contours of the vegetal sensorium, and the affective
ecologies of plant/insect relations. Her new work tracks the formation and
propagation of plant publics as artists and scientists stage interventions
in sites like botanical gardens. Links to her research, research-creation
projects, and publications can be
 found at http://natashamyers.org <http://natashamyers.org/>

Selmin Kara is Assistant Professor of Film and New Media at OCAD
University. She has critical interests in digital aesthetics and tropes
related to the anthropocene and extinction in cinema as well as the use of
sound and new technologies in contemporary documentary. Selmin¹s work has
appeared and is forthcoming in Studies in Documentary Film, Poiesis,
 the Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media, Music and Sound
in Nonfiction Film, Post-Cinema, and The Philosophy of Documentary Film.
She has recently co-edited a journal issue on documentary art activism and
is currently co-editing an anthology on emergent forms and genres in
contemporary documentary, to be published by Routledge in Fall 2015.

Patrick Keilty is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Information at the
University of Toronto and Instructor in the Bonham Centre for Sexual
Diversity Studies there. Professor Keilty works at the intersection of
media studies, technology studies, and information studies. His primary
teaching and research field is digital culture, with a particular focus on
visual culture, new media art, metadata and database logic, database
cinema, pornography, gender, sexuality, race, and critical theory. His
monograph project, provisionally titled Database Desire, engages the
question of how our embodied engagements with labyrinthine 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, and feminist and queer new media and technoscience
issues generally. More at http://www.patrickkeilty.com/.

Renate Ferro
Visiting Assistant Professor of Art,Cornell University
Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office:  306
Ithaca, NY  14853
Email:   <rferro at cornell.edu <mailto:rtf9 at cornell.edu>>
URL:  http://www.renateferro.net <http://www.renateferro.net/>
      http://www.privatesecretspubliclies.net
<http://www.privatesecretspubliclies.net/>
Lab:  http://www.tinkerfactory.net <http://www.tinkerfactory.net/>

Managing Co-moderator of -empyre- soft skinned space
http://empyre.library.cornell.edu/