[-empyre-] See you in January.

[Renate Terese Ferro]

Thanks to Marisa Tesauro, Catherine Grau, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Tim Murray, Christina McPhee, Rahul Mukherjee, Andrea Haenggi, 
Amy Sara Carroll, Ricardo Dominguez, Melinda Rackham, Ben Kinsley, and Ian Paul for being out invited guests this month.  I’ve attached a photo of the four spruce trees I just planted in our expansive acreage where weeds and sustainable fruit trees, crops, evergreens, maples, locusts, and more grow.

A sincere thank you for helping to sort through the practical and conceptual networks of contamination.  The layered complexities of our discussion only begin to unpack the broad implications of the topic.  The world is contaminated. From our environment to bio-networks to language, communication, and relationships, to governments and financial
markets, to the digital spaces of bits and the virtual, the “digital delirium” of the present, both the real and the virtual are mixed together in a bubbling stew of contaminated waste.
Contamination is omnipresent and effluvial (thanks Ricardo ). How can we as artists, poets, writers, philosophers, theorists, bread makers, environmentalists, mushroom experts, coders, weed pullers, and so many more continue to think through contamination to imagine how to make effective change? A mission for all of us to continue. 

A shout out to Aviva for your post and yes the state of the US  government was the subtext for the idea of this topic, but we want to  acknowledge the fact that this  contamination has seeped out beyond the US to all parts of the globe.  We will have to stay tuned to the news over the next few weeks to try to understand the extent of that effect of this Trumpian seepage.  

Wishing all of you and our subscribers on –empyre- soft-skinned space a beautiful holiday and New Year with as little contamination as possible. 

I don’t think that I gave a shout out to Melinda Rackham early on in the week.  –empyre- soft-skinned space was the brain-child of Melinda in the early 2000’s. The list serv was conceived as a research forum for Rackham's PhD research at the College of Fine Arts, UNSW, Australia.  Tim Murray and I joined –empyre- in 2007 a bit after Melinda turned the list-serv over to a moderating board who have shepherded the group to over 2000 subscribers. 

We are signing off now and will not return until after the New Year with the organizational structure of a new Editorial Board for 2018 and a new look to the –empyre- website.
Best Wishes to all. 
Renate

Renate Ferro
Visiting Associate Professor
Director of Undergraduate Studies
Department of Art
Tjaden Hall 306
rferro at cornell.edu