[-empyre-] Welcome to the July 2016 discussion on -empyre- : Feminist Data Visualization

Fri Jul 1 18:05:05 AEST 2016

dear -empyreans-,

Back after a long break— and very pleased to introduce a topic of compelling interest. I hope to learn from everyone in the coming month as we take on “feminist data visualization”. 

Feminist Data Visualization / Moderated by Christina McPhee, with invited guests

Week 1:  Catherine D’Ignazio, Lauren Klein, Erin Leland, and Lee Mackinnon 
Week 2: Katherine Behar, Fiamma Montezemolo, and Annina Rüst
Week 3: Carolyn Castaño, Johanna Drucker, and Erin MacElroy 
Week 4: Tif Robinette, Beatriz Cortez, and Aviva Rahmani 

A chance encounter at the Smithsonian in March 2015 with the art historian Katie Anania (soon  to be a fellow at the Morgan Library, New York City) has led to this moment. Two years earlier, Katie had curated a show called “Four Core Chambers,” (at Martina-Johnston Gallery, Berkeley, California).  The show’s remit led artists to deal with ‘heart’ — in many senses—from anatomical to geographical, edible to surgical, humanitarian to political. Now with Katie in our chance meeting, we talked about how to ‘liberate the subject’ through drawing— meaning to release subjects from representation as ‘other’ or alien and into fields or mappings for which the context is indeterminate, or generative, or both. Next, Katie emailed me a link to a blog post written for the MIT Center for Civic Media by one of its research colleagues, Catherine d’Ignazio—  https://civic.mit.edu/feminist-data-visualization <https://civic.mit.edu/feminist-data-visualization>  . 

My call to the guests is inspired by a quote from Catherine— these words: “There are ways to "situate" data visualization and locate it in concrete bodies and geographies. Critical cartographers, counter-mapping artists, indigenous mappers and others have experimented for years with these methods and we can learn from them.” 

Our  guests practice across broad interfaciae —journalistic writing, scholarship and theory, visual and performance art, new media and activism.  As always in this kind of inquiry we are working in the shadow of greats, such as Donna Haraway.  Current violences inside rhetoric, narrative, statistics and gaze around the tragedy at Orlando shadow the space and the setting in which we begin. 

all my best

Christina 

PS  Renata has asked me to include a brief bit about me as moderator— so here are a few notes on my practice as it relates to the current topic. 

As an artist and writer I’ve been working around scientific visualization, from sonifiying atmospheric carbon release data on the tall grass prairie, Slipstreamkonza, 2002-3) to seismic memory linking geomorphologies in the aftermath of earthquakes and PTSD (Carrizo-Parkfield Diaries, 2005-6), to investigating the uncertainty of vision and identity in Double Blind Studies (2012), to creating a multimedia performance around the carbon cycle (Carbon Song Cycle, with Pamela Z, 2013), to new work in painting, drawing, and video, imbricating visual codes from pharmaceuticals to pesticides to ocean acidification, and set into anime-Mayan-glyph’d compositions (2016). Thanks to d12 Magazine Project, I organized three conversations on the themes of documenta12 with -empyre-, then affiliated with the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, Sydney, in 2007-2008. My involvement with -empyre- goes back to
its earliest days in 2002 at the invitation of its founder, Melinda Packham. My new paintings, drawings and gelatin silver prints will open in a solo show at Cerritos College Art Gallery, Los Angeles, in September 2016. A monograph on my work across media, edited by Eileen Joy and featuring essays and interviews by Ina Blom, Frazer Ward, and others is forthcoming with Punctum Books in November 2016.  http://www.christinamcphee.net/about/ <http://www.christinamcphee.net/about/>

 http://christinamcphee.net <http://christinamcphee.net/>  

Christina McPhee

http://christinamcphee.net
insta: naxqqsmash

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