[-empyre-] Week Four for "Feminist Data Visualization" - July 2016 on -empyre- soft-skinned space

[christina at christinamcphee.net]

dear -empyreans-, 

What is Feminist Data Visualization, what could it be? Thank you, amazing guests from week three, Johanna Drucker, Carolyn Castaño, and Erin McElroy…this week explored enunciation and semiotics of data as ‘capta’, intersectional and historical reperfromance, and live mapping… a heady brew. 

If you want to catch up on reading the discussion, the threads are discovered here.  http://lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2016-July/thread.html


Continuing with the counterpoint and polyphony of many voices, this week focusses on three artists whose critical practices span performance, sculpture, spatial activism, and other disciplines.  I’m very pleased 
to introduce Tif Robinette, Beatriz Cortez and Aviva Rahmani!

Please welcome them, drop everything, and read!

To post, just send in to the Cornell interface which, slightly confusingly, is still run outta Sidney  empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au  

… we are multi-hemispheric….

all my best

Christina (moderator) 



week 4 July 22-29

Tif Robinette  
How do feminist, queer, and magical theory disrupt our ideal of the evolving human? How does the Other, a creature of multiplicity, hybridity, and post-humanism, connect back to the land and to other species? As we evolve in conjunction with plants, animals, and the machine, in what ways will we intersect, hybridize, and reconvene? Agrofemme’s praxis investigates these queer/ies through drawings, photography, video, objects, and interventions through text and ritual, embodied in live performance.  A West Virginia native and Brooklyn transplant, Agrofemme performs and exhibits their work internationally.  http://www.agrofemme.com  @agrobaby on IG


Beatriz Cortez 

-Beatriz Cortez is a writer and an artist. She was born in El Salvador and has lived in the United States since 1989. As an artist, her work explores simultaneity, the existence in different temporalities and different versions of modernity, particularly in relation to memory and loss in the aftermath of war and the experience of immigration, and in relation to imagining possible futures. She has exhibited her work nationally in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and internationally in El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Guatemala. As a scholar, she specializes in contemporary Central American literatures and cultures, and explores ideas of becoming, and esthetics of the future. She is the author of Aesthetics of Cynicism: Post-War Central American Fiction (Guatemala: F&G Editores, 2010), and co-editor of Per-Versions of Modernity: Literatures, Identities, and Displacements (Guatemala: F&G Editores, 2012). She has also co-edited special issues on contemporary Central American cultural studies, cultures, and literatures for Revista Iberoamericana (University of Pittsburgh, 2013) and Istmo: Interdisciplinary Journal of Central American Literature and Cultural Studies. She holds a Masters of Fine Arts from the California Institute of the Arts, and a doctorate in Latin American literature from Arizona State University. She is full professor in the Central American Studies Program at California State University, Northridge. She lives and works in Los Angeles.  https://beatrizcortez.com

Aviva Rahmani 

Aviva Rahmani calls her practice, “performing ecology.” Her doctoral dissertation, “Trigger Point Theory as Aesthetic Activism,” was awarded from Plymouth University, UK in 2015. That research contributed to the Blued Trees symphony (2015- present). The 16-month long international work has been installed and copyrighted in the path of natural gas pipelines at multiple sites. It is an aspect of Gulf to Gulf (2009- present), a NYFA sponsored project exploring how art might change climate change policy. Rahmani began her career as a performance artist in the late sixties as the director and founder of the American Ritual Theatre (1968-1971), which performed through out California. Her work has been exhibited and published internationally and she has produced over twenty one-hour raw Gulf to Gulf sessions which have been viewed on line from eighty-five countries. “Trigger Points/ Tipping Points,” a precursor to Gulf to Gulf, premiered at the 2007 Venice Biennale. In 2009, she began presenting performance workshops on her theoretical approach to environmental restoration, at Survival Academy, Copenhagen, Denmark, as observer for the University of Colorado at Boulder (UCB) at the United Nations IPCC conference on climate change. Rahmani has received an Arts and Healing Network 2009 award for her work on water,  is  an Affiliate at the Institute for Arctic and Alpine research (INSTAAR), University of California-Berkeley; and won the Nancy H. Gray Foundation for Art in the Environment grant for her work on the Ghost Nets project, involving restoration of a former dump site to a flourishing wetlands system. She  helped catalyze a USDA expenditure of $500,000 to restore 26 acres of critical wetlands habitat (the Blue Rocks project) in the Gulf of Maine. A National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Ecology Residency with the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in 2015 has supported her work on the Newtown Creek superfund site, New York.  http://www.ghostnets.com