[-empyre-] The Private is Public.

[Renate Terese Ferro]

Thanks William and Anna.  I was so thankful for reading the Frieze article that inspired my post.  By now both Anna and Lindsay are happily basking in the successes of the day long seminar on Fake News.  Anna I thought I would mention my project Private Secrets Public Lies <www.privatesecretspubliclies.net>  First conceived in 2011 to 2012, the game portion was done in processing and its embedded in an HTML/PHP web document.  In watching the Comey hearings yesterday I was struck by how the headlines have shifted from fakeness to outright lies. Back when I was working on Private Secrets Public Lies I was thinking about  how lies and secrets are incredibly interlinked.  This project was inspired by international news reports whose origins were in the realm of the personal: the Catholic priests’ sexual abuse scandals, chemicals of mass destruction controversy (Valerie Plane), Bush illegal wiretaps, the private lives of heads of state (Bill Clinton) and royalty (Princess Diana), or even the revelations of Julian Assange’s wiki-leaks.
Private Secrets Public Lies blends the boundaries between private and public, analog and digital. The translation of private data, enabled by the speed and instantaneous nature of the public domain of the internet, is at the core of this project. Secrets are at the crux of relationships within the privacy of family dynamics or the public realm of celebrity tabloids or even international governmental relations. The influence of digital culture and viral technology enables the intrigue of these secrets and lies.

In Comey’s case a private dinner, a pat on the back by Trump, a nod and a wink towards loyalty have prompted national and international attention.  The private is public.  Yes, Anna has encouraged our subscriber artists to share their work.  Anyone working on related projects?  Would love to hear about them.  

In the meantime I will be introducing Week 2 guests and just to let everyone know Anna Munster and Lindsay Kelley will be back.  Lindsay I will say briefly here that I loved your point about FAKE FOOD but more on that later.  Too many great thoughts to be continued.  

Renate

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







On 6/6/17, 6:40 PM, "empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of Renate Terese Ferro" <empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of rferro at cornell.edu> wrote:

>----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>Dear all, 
>Thanks Anna and Lindsay for telling us a bit about your upcoming event at the University of New South Wales on Friday.  I wish we were a bit closer so we could attend but for now will rely on your reportage.  Really looking forward to it as the month unfolds.  I would like to pause a bit for this post at least on the question you post early on in this morning, 
>
>Anna wrote <snip>
>Is it the case that (the)media and arts are located in completely different spaces and are responding with totally different tactics or strategies in the wake of ‘post-truth’ politics? 
>It seems as though so much old media is caught up within an epistemological chasm, flung back and forth between being a pack of liars and defending the ‘facts’. Being duly investigative. 
>The social media scape, on the other hand, feeds itself on more and more elaborate stoushes around ‘lies’, rumour and ironic irony…
><snip>
>
>In the March 2017 issue of Frieze magazine, writer Pablo Larious, wrote a hilarious” letter” to Andy Warhol in his essay “How Real is Real? From Donald Trump’s post-truth to Andy Warhol’s philosophy, and back again.”  In essence the essay takes the form of a letter to Warhol that sets the stage of life, art and politics within the pro-wrestling world.  That world was one of Warhol’s favorite where in 1985 he was interviewed after a Wrestling-Mania event in Madison Square garden.  Larious, an Berlin based art critic trained in comparative literature, reminds us that the root of the  word wrestling actually means to ‘steal’ or ‘distort the meaning of.’ 
>
>Larious asks questions to Warhol as if he were alive today in 2017 in the middle of a rigged world:
>“Would you like to talk to me sometime about how daily life became so spectacularly news worthy, so fake…I’d like to ask you about the sad irony, in 2017…Is it okay if I ask you about your relationship to a man named Donald Trump—“  Ironically, it was Warhol who wrote twenty plus years ago a potential script for Donald Trump, “the president has so much good publicizing potential.” In fact Warhol intersected with Trump on several occasions over a silkscreen print. In turn it was Trump who quoted Warhol’s writing “good business is the best art” printed in two of Trump’s books.  
>
>Given the legacy that Warhol left, the convergence of life and art, business and brand, I ponder over how old and social media has been archived, fragmented, re-used to such as extent that both create gaps of innuendo for all facets of our existence including politics.  Larious critically asks his readers if it is possible that we discern “fakery” and “mockery” from the “real” in an age where everything is layered with the discrepancies of digital re-production and  social media.
>
>Tim and I are looking forward to more discussions on fake news especially through the lens of our global subscribers.  Hope you will all feel free to post. 
>Renate
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>Renate Ferro
>Visiting Associate Professor
>Director of Undergraduate Studies
>Department of Art
>Tjaden Hall 306
>rferro at cornell.edu
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>On 6/6/17, 4:51 AM, "empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of Anna Munster" <empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of a.munster at unsw.edu.au> wrote:
>
>>----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>>Thanks Renata and Tim!
>>
>>Lindsay and I are pretty interested in asking about what art might do in the global fakescape currently permeating the atmosphere.
>>
>>Is it the case that (the)media and arts are located in completely different spaces and are responding with totally different tactics or strategies in the wake of ‘post-truth’ politics? 
>>It seems as though so much old media is caught up within an epistemological chasm, flung back and forth between being a pack of liars and defending the ‘facts’. Being duly investigative. 
>>The social media scape, on the other hand, feeds itself on more and more elaborate stoushes around ‘lies’, rumour and ironic irony…
>>
>>What powers might art hold to do something different? Isn’t art built upon the fake, upon reflexivity about its own performativity: The Yes Men, Pierre Huyghe,AUDINT (http://audint.net/n2017/deadrecordoffice/), The Museum of Jurassic Technology….all deploy the fake in another spacetime than in opposition to the ‘real’ or the ‘true’…..
>>
>>We are about to run an event: FAKE NEWS from the Art and Politics Bureau’ as Renate mentioned…..we’ll let you know what we have to ‘report’ (already a problem and questioned by new and experimental forms of documentary)…
>>
>>cheers Anna
>>
>>Professor Anna Munster
>>UNSW Art and Design.
>>Sydney, Australia
>>
>>_______________________________________________
>>empyre forum
>>empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
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>_______________________________________________
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