[-empyre-] Week 3: Science, Technology, Art and Fakeness

[Hamilton, Kevin]

Hello Byron,

Thank you for the thoughtful reply and reflection. In your thoughts I recognize some subjects from past empyre discussions about questions surrounding political efficacy. It resonates with me that you claim so strongly the importance of subversion as a strategy or tactic, while also taking care about the claims you might make for the political effects of subversive acts.

I hear in your comments an implicit reminder that the use of particular tactics or approaches are important to the formation of the person adopting those approaches, regardless of their external impact. I so enjoyed, in my viewing of your presentation at CAA, for example, your use of powerpoint aesthetics and rhetorics of science and marketing. I recall a kind of queering of scientific and medical "acronym-speak" that must also just help open up the world for you.

This then reminds me that the rhetorics and tactics of climate-change-deniers are equally concerned with the formation of speaking and knowing subjects as with the influence of shared civic discourse or priorities.

I first got interested in science studies through reading histories of 20th c. communication technology connected to 19th c vaudeville and magic (J.Sconce, Crary, Leigh Eric Schmidt, etc). Such geneologies helped me see how subjectivity and sensation get shaped through both the depictions of science and the application of science to new sensory possibilities.

In that light, it would be interesting to put the visual and linguistic rhetorics of bio-hacking art practices next to depictions of biology across recent television crime serials or home gene-testing kits like 23 and me, etc, and then again next to the rhetorics applied in depictions of forensic science associated with national trauma (as in Central and South America).

Perhaps we're getting a bit away from climate change as the main site for thinking about the rhetorics of FAKE NEWS in light of aesthetic subversion, but it seems to me that among the greatest contributions of these artists are their invitation to see the staging of scientific certainty not "hoax reveal" but as a way of shining light on our own processes of formation.

Kevin

PS - I could say similar things about humor I'm sure Renate - as we know that humor is as much for the joke-teller as for the hearer...



From: <empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au> on behalf of Byron Rich <byroncbrich at gmail.com>
Reply-To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>
Date: Wednesday, June 21, 2017 at 6:56 AM
To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Week 3: Science, Technology, Art and Fakeness

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