[-empyre-] 'On Racial Violence, Love and Information, Brexit and Dramaturgy of Data’

[christina at christinamcphee.net]

Aviva, et al, 

If Johanna Drucker is accurate in her insistence on grasping the concept of ‘data' as ‘capta,’ (see http://lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2016-July/009208.html <http://lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2016-July/009208.html>)

 then, ‘the danger of built in biases’ is just so, built or baked in, or to put it in the reverse, there is no such entity as unbiased data.  Logically, then, ‘capta’ itself embodies a social world.  

To that point, Rebecca Prichard has called forth, in the original post on this thread (see link below) the example of works by three artists, Caryl Churchill, Evelyn Wau, and John Edmonds. Thinking about these, I”m most familiar personally with Caryl Churchill’s plays, one of which I actually saw played in London, ‘Far Away’ at the Young Vic (2014). It was a hallucinatory experience of entering into a complicit texture of image and voice with no ‘outside’. 

The scary totalizing of capta-as-social world is on full display at the moment, too, with the spectacle, or spectre (ghosting), of hate rhetoric in the American media.  The total work of art, gesamtwerk…

So I wonder, as if to say, yes the violence of information visualization is implicit and structural in its very inception, is the beginning of feminist consciousness. 

Its growth, form, texture, and proliferation is another matter.  We will learn about Aviva Rahmani’s project in this regard next week. For now, I want to just copy and paste a quote from Rebecca Prichard’s comment that begins this
thread.  She describes how such growth and generation works in Churchill’s play “Love and Information” :


"In some ways,  thinking about Caryl Churchill's 'Love and Information’ is useful, since it is a play which explores the social role of data in the 'Information Age', or more broadly put, how human relationships and our relationship to the world are constituted/qualified/quantified by the circulation of data in the ‘anthropocene'. The play's scope is as voraciously wide as this would suggest. One of the most vivid images of violence in the play is of a chick whose head is snipped off by a scientist after s/he has measured the neurological effect of the chick's cognisance of a particular event. The structure of the play (a series of apparently random brief exchanges, each involving a dynamic around the reduction of living systems to information) suggests that these processes of reduction and their violence is culturally prevalent, even a cultural necessity. In Churchill's play the urge to kill in order to measure drives a much broader cultural obsession with secrets and with exposure - the act of knowing is part of the act of consuming, which in turn is the only mode of relating; human relationships are constituted as data at the same time that data drives the constitution of human relationships. “   - Rebecca Prichard  http://lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2016-July/009186.html <http://lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2016-July/009186.html>




Christina 





Christina McPhee

http://christinamcphee.net






> On Jul 17, 2016, at 10:22 PM, AAR <ghostnets at ghostnets.com> wrote:
> 
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> I have been scrambling to catch up with all the thoughtful, interesting and erudite posts. It seems we are all addressing WHAT is made transparent with the data, and HOW it is made evident, with the danger of built in biases in methodologies. I am reminded of a very simple but powerful mapping from the activist black artist, Paul Rucker, which simply overlaid the distribution of plantation slave holdings and contemporary prison systems in the Mississippi Water Basin. This is now the same region being mercilessly exploited by frackers, at the expense of the richest farmland on the US continent. I think it’s worth comparing examples across the gender and racial spectrum, to possibly narrow down what we uniquely have to contribute as Feminists, altho, honestly, I am a bit stumped about what conclusions might be drawn. I would be very glad if someone could put their fingers on some bullet points that might distinguish the results of a Feminist point of view on data from the observations or effects of other interest groups..
> 
> 
> “What the world needs is a good housekeeper.”
> Aviva Rahmani, PhD
> Affiliate INSTAAR, University of CO. at Boulder
> https://www.nyfa.org/ArtistDirectory/ShowProject/1446ef3a-0a9d-4449-96be-74023eb9c376 <https://www.nyfa.org/ArtistDirectory/ShowProject/1446ef3a-0a9d-4449-96be-74023eb9c376>
> Watch “Blued Trees”:  https://vimeo.com/135290635 <https://vimeo.com/135290635>
> www.ghostnets.com <http://www.ghostnets.com/>
> www.gulftogulf.org
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
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