[-empyre-] All call: subscribers interested in Boredom: Labor, Use and Time

[Murat Nemet-Nejat]

"Murat you have assimilated both Simon's and Ana's posts in a way that
makes so much sense though I'm wondering if you would say a bit more about
the negative value of nothingness.  How is it possible to give value to
absence? . Perhaps our resident philosophers can chime in here?"

Renate, many of my comments during the last two weeks may have appeared off
topic, but that is exactly what I was driving at. Kierkegaard describes an
unconscious kind of despair. That is I think very much like our modern
condition, as Ana describes. I think it is absolute essential to penetrate
the obfuscations of modern systems of persuasion to reach consciousness.
Consciousness becomes resistance. That is what I mean by negative value of
nothing: *an intentional slowing down*, to undercut what I described as
illusionary efficiency. If you remember, the main point of my arguments
with Bob was that our discussion about boredom had an efficiency bias
(which he admitted) which skewered the argument.

In literature, I think, the most succinct example of the kind of resistance
I am discussing is in Herman Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener": the
clerk who responds to every job he is asked to do: "I would rather not."

A softer version of it which has to do with creativity (about anxiety about
the passage of time, anxiety about not being efficient is Keats's "negative
capability."

In an interview which I think can be found on line the film maker Renoir
talks about the destructive effects in film art of too much, excessive
technical prowess (a big issue with digital effect which seemingly enables
one to create any effect one wants. The last sci-fi film that has NO
digital effects is Blade Runner. Is there any film since them where the
visual effects are more startling, more moving or revealing? I think
"inneficiencies" force people to "choose" which is the greatest antidote
against boredom as in a Panopticon or in a prison cell in isolation.

Ciao,
Murat

On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 7:01 PM, Renate Ferro <renateferro at gmail.com> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Murat you have assimilated both Simon's and Ana's posts in a way that
> makes so much sense though I'm wondering if you would say a bit more about
> the negative value of nothingness.  How is it possible to give value to
> absence? . Perhaps our resident philosophers can chime in here?
>
> This might be a great segue into Week 4. While we say thank you to Simon
> Biggs and Ana Valdes,
> We welcome Erin Obodiac and Jason Bernagozzi to our final week on Boredom.
> Their biographies are below.
>
> Week 4:
>
> 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
>
> deconstruction within the history of cybernetics and machinic life. The
> Transhuman
>
> Interface is a result of the research project “Robots at Risk: Transgenic
> Art and
>
> Corporate Personhood,” which Obodiac began as a Fellow at Cornell’s
> 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
>
>
>
>
>
>>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>
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