[-empyre-] Welcome to May: Boredom: Labor, Use and Time

[Renate Terese Ferro]

Welcome to May 2015 on ­empyre soft-skinned space:
Boredom:  Labor, Use, and Time
Moderated by
Renate Ferro (US) with invited discussants
May 4 to 10th Week 1:  John Stadler (US) and Ben Bogart (CA)
May 11 to 17th Week 2: Emilie St.Hilaire (CA)
May 18to 25th Week 3:  Simon Biggs (AU) Ana Valdes (UR)
May 26 to 31st Week 4:  Erin Obodiac (CA), Jason Bernagozzi (US)


A cross-disciplinary discussion on the concept of Boredom: Labor, Use and
Time. Boredom as a conceptual/theoretical motif. Boredom as a lack but
also the excessive immersion of something that
leads to a null or void. Boredom, neither positive nor negative, but a
potential that opens up critical consideration about the use of
technology, duration, time, and tempo.
For the month of May ­empyre- soft-skinned space gathers a group of a
cross-disciplinary artists, writers, and technologists who will be
discussing the concept of boredom. Boredom not
boring. We will feature two guests per week as in most of our other topics
but his this open call for June invites subscribers and others to share
many kinds of analysis or comment‹historical,
observational, theoretical, or popular. All are invited for the month of
June.

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Biographies:
Moderator:
Renate Ferro  (US) is a conceptual artist working in emerging technology
and culture. Most recently her work has been featured at The Freud Museum
(London), The Dorksy Gallery (NY), The Hemispheric Institute and FOMMA
(Mexico), The Janus Pannonius Muzeum (Hungary), and The Free University
Berlin (Germany).  Her work has been published in such journals as
Diacritics, Theatre Journal, and Epoch. She is a managing moderator for
the online new media list serve -empyre-soft-skinned space. Ferro is a
Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Art at Cornell
University teaching digital media and theory. She also directs the Tinker
Factory, a creative research lab for Interdisciplinary Research.

Guests:  Week 1
John Stadler is a PhD candidate in the Program in Literature at Duke
University. He is currently writing his dissertation, titled ³Pornography
and the Everyday,² which tracks how pornography¹s saturation into everyday
life has altered the manner in which pleasure is produced, received, and
spoken of. Of particular interest to this work is how pornography makes
use of the idea of boredom, often taken to be pornography¹s antithetical
aim, not to thwart pleasure but rather to deliver it. His recent articles
have appeared in
Jump Cut and Art and Documentation.

Ben Bogart is a generative artist primarily working in installation and
print whose practice is located at theintersection of art and science.
Physical modeling, chaos, feedback systems, evolutionary algorithms,
computer vision, and machine learning have beenused to inform and engage
in his creative process. Ben holds a
Ph.D. in Interactive Arts and Technology from Simon Fraser University. In
his Ph.D. research, he proposes an Integrative Theory of cognitive and
neurobiological mechanisms of perception, mental imagery,
mind-wandering,and dreaming. This cognitive framework is manifest in his
Ph.D. project, a
computational model and site-specific generative art installation titled
Dreaming Machine #3. Ben is currently developing a new realization of this
cognitive framework, titled Watching and Dreaming, which uses popular
cinematic depictions of Artificial Intelligence as raw material.

Week 2:
Emilie St.Hilaire is an intermedia artist and recent MFA graduate working
with video and installation to invite meditative encounters in which to
re/consider technology. Through the use of dark spaces lit by glowing
screens and subtle projections Emilie's work creates space between the
virtual and the real, the natural and the artificial, light and dark.
Emilie has also worked on site-specific projects involving
interactive installation and live-feed video. Originally from the
francophone community of St-Boniface, in Winnipeg, Emilie will be joining
the interdisciplinary Humanities Doctoral Program at Concordia University,
in Montreal, in the fall of 2015.

Lyn Goeringer is an intermedia artist, performer, and independent scholar.
Her research focuses on intermedia and interactive approaches to public
space and site-specific art practices with a particular focus on the
experience of the body in space. At the center of this research are
questions about how we as individuals create and navigate space, and the
ways in which larger government infrastructures influence how we navigate
public and private spheres. These questions driver her artistic practice
and led her to work within a variety of media, including body-centered
cybernetic performance art that explores notions of privacy, wearable
controllers, audio walks and public sound art. As an extension of her
research in liminality
within the Everyday, Goeringer also works with and incorporate notions of
play within labor practices into art and sound composition especially
within the context of labor disruption, and was invited to participate in
the Cleveland Performance Art Festival in 2013 as a part of the ENACT
exhibition. Curated by Anne Torke and Nanette Yannuzzi. For this festival,
she contributed a sound
performance piece for six performers titled Œbi-product of labor¹. This
performance is part of a larger ongoing series of pieces the Œbi-product¹
of labor, which seeks to explore, catalog, and present the ways in which
we subvert labor practices in daily life. In November of 2013, the next
iteration of Œbi-product of labor¹ will be on view in Abu Dhabi at Studio
1054.
http://www.lyngoeringer.com/portfolio/?page_id=353


Week 3:
Ana Valdes was born in Uruguay, South America, in a family of Spanish and
Italian emigrants, raised by German nuns where studied Geography from
German maps from 1942. At that time she was taught and she believed firmly
that Belgium, Netherlands, France, Norway and Denmark were a part of
Germany. She was put in prison when she was 19 years old for her
politicalviews. Ana belonged to a guerilla group called Tupamaros, at that
time she believed that weapons were a way to change things though she has
changed her views, radically, and since then has been a member of the
pacifist group Women in Black for many years. After 4 years in prison she
was deported to Sweden where she came of age. She studied Anthropology and
worked on death and blood ceremonies. 1982 she published her first
award-winning book of short stories (Sorbonne University) A bilingual
writer in Swedish and in Spanish, she has written and published more than
ten books many of which have been translated into English, French, Greek
and Italian. Her latest book, ³Your Time Will Come² recounts her time in
prison including the torture and the resistance. Counterpunch published an
essay of her experiences as well
(http://www.counterpunch.org/2006/03/28/torture-works/). She has
participated in several debates about violence and representation
including one with Jordan Crandall, ³Under fire²
(http://www.wdw.nl/wdw_publications/jordan-crandall-under-fire-2/).
    
Ana is also an independent curator and has worked with Swedish visual
artist Cecilia Parsberg in Palestine where they created the network
³Equator² (http://www.ceciliaparsberg.se/equator).
    
A long-time member and guest moderator of -empyre- her topics have related
to the representations of the Arabs in the contemporary world, the
Crusades, and to urbanism and resilience.
Simon Biggs (born Adelaide, Australia 1957. UK since 1986) is a media
artist, writer and curator with interests in digital poetics,
auto-generative/interpretive (affective) systems, interactive and
performative environments, interdisciplinary research and co-creation. His
work has been widely presented, including at Tate Modern, Institute of
Contemporary Arts, Glasgow Centre for Contemporary Arts, Kettles Yard,
Pompidou Centre, Academy de Kunste, Berlin Kulturforum, Rijksmuseum
Twenthe, Maxxi Rome, Macau Arts Museum, San Francisco Cameraworks, Walker
Art Center and Art Gallery of New South Wales. He has been keynote at many
conferences and lectured internationally, including ISEA, ePoetry, SLSA
and FILE conferences and Cambridge, Brown, UC Santa Barbara, UC Davis,
Cornell, Paris8, Sorbonne and Bergen Universities, amongst others.
Publications include Remediating the Social (2012), Autopoeisis (with
James Leach, 2004), Great Wall of China (1999), Halo (1998), Magnet (1997)
and Book of Shadows (1996). He is lead investigator on a number of major
research projects and Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts, Edinburgh
College of Art at the University of
Edinburgh, where he directs the Masters by Research in Interdisciplinary
Creative Practices and several PhD students. He is chairing Remediating
the Social in Edinburgh, November 1-3 2012, as part of the ELMCIP project
http://www.elmcip.net/

Erin Obodiac (TBA)Erin
Obodiac (US) received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the
University of California, Irvine and has held teaching and research
appointments at UC Irvine, the
University of Leeds, SUNY Albany, and Cornell University. Her writings
assemble residual questions from the deconstructive legacy with emergent
discourses on technics and
animality, robotics, and biomedia. She is currently a Mellon postdoctoral
fellow at Cornell University, teaching a series of Comparative Media
seminars and completing a book
called The Transhuman Interface, which repositions critical theory and
deconstructionwithin the history of cybernetics and machinic life. The
Transhuman
Interface is a result of the research project ³Robots at Risk: Transgenic
Art and Corporate Personhood,² which Obodiac began as a Fellow at
Cornell¹s Society for the
Humanities. The project and the accompanying book manuscript examine
contemporary theories of machinic life and robotics as well as the
philosophical traditions that
underpin them. This summer, Obodiac will finish a cinematic version of her
Ph.D. dissertation, Technics and the Sublime.

Jason Bernagozzi (US) is a video, sound and new media artist living and
working in upstate New York and is the co-founder and chair of the board
of directors of the experimental media arts non-profit Signal Culture. His
work has been featured nationally and internationally at venues such as
the European Media Arts Festival in Osnabruk, Germany, the LOOP Video Art
Festival in Barcelona,
Spain, the Beyond/In Western NY Biennial in Buffalo, NY, and the Yan
Gerber International Arts Festival in Hebei Province, China. His work has
received
several awards including grants from the New York State Council for the
Arts, Wavefarm and the ARTS Council for the Southern Finger Lakes. He is
an Assistant Professor in Digital Media and Animation at Alfred State
College.
http://seeinginvideo.com/
http://www.signalculture.org <http://www.signalculture.org/>
<http://www.signalculture.org/>




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/