[-empyre-] Week 4: Welcome Lindsay Kelley, Anna Munster, Randall Packer, and Ana Valdex

Wed Jun 28 06:14:52 AEST 2017

Dear List:

Since August of 2015, I have been chronicling the TRUMP phenomenon, which I refer to as XTreme TRUMPology. Here are 50 posts I have written to date: http://www.randallpacker.com/category/xtreme-trumpology/

I see the developing fake news issue as the catalyst of a much greater problem: the intentional distortion of reality for the purpose of gaining political control. Fake news is a means to an end, what happens when morally bankrupt demagogues are in pursuit of absolute power. 

To this end, it beholds us to construct critical “weapons” that we can use to deconstruct and defuse this diabolical fakery, and it is my hope, that during this next week, the empyre list can serve as both a virtual roundtable for discussion, as well as a space for developing tactical methods we can employ as media artists, theorists, and educators in our everyday lives and work. Some of these methods have already been identified in past weeks… I hope to see more! 

These are dangerous times and I am interested in the kinds of critical tools we can develop collectively to combat the torrent of fakery and disinformation that is consuming our government, our country, and the world. 

It’s time for action.  

Best, Randall

On 6/27/17, 8:48 AM, "Randall Packer" <rpacker at zakros.com> wrote:

    Greetings all… I am gathering my reportage on this critical issue, one that threatens to engulf our collective grip on reality. Here in Washington, DC, the tension is palpable as we see democracy hanging by a thread in the face of the steady, hypnotic torrent of disinformation emanating from all corners of the government. I don’t take this responsibility lightly as an empyre reporter, and will be posting my first dispatch later in the day.  

    Best,

    Randall :::: from the underground studio bunker in Washington, DC

    On 6/26/17, 5:17 AM, "Renate Terese Ferro" <empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of rferro at cornell.edu> wrote:

        ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
        Thanks to Kevin, Byron, Murat and Aviva for participating this week as we reflected on the notion of the fake in regards to science and art.  I realized about midway through the week that the questions that arose were important and thoughtful ones that actually would make an excellent month long topic in the near future on -empyre-.  Kevin reminded us of the trend where truth-claims of scientists have been undermined for political causes. It also reminded me of the  fraud that big science and the pharmaceutical industry have been accused of where research studies have been manipulated for economic gain.  Artists can provide the critical space using  the tools and methodology of science to create critical spaces where the public can pause, reflect, and activate a sense of resistance.  

        Welcome to Randall Packer, Ana Valdes, Ana Munster and Lindsay Kelley.  Ana Munster and Lindsay were our guests during week one and we welcome them back as we close down our topic.  Ana Vales has been a long time participant of -empyre- and we welcome her back this week.  Randall Packer participated in a panel with me at ISEA in Singapore last year.   We warmly welcome all of them to further discuss Fake News within a global context. Bios are below.  

        Lindsay Kelley (AU) Working in the kitchen, Lindsay Kelley's art
        practice and scholarship explore how the experience of eating changes when
        technologies are being eaten. Her first book is Bioart Kitchen: Art,
        Feminism and Technoscience (London: IB Tauris, 2016). Bioart
        Kitchen emerges from her work at the University of California Santa
        Cruz (Ph.D in the History of Consciousness and MFA in Digital Art and New
        Media). Kelley is a Co-Investigator with the KIAS
        funded Research-Creation and Social Justice CoLABoratory: Arts and the
        Anthropocene (University of Alberta, Canada).

        Anna Munster (US) Anna Munster has been at UNSW Art and Design since 2001 on a full-time tenured
        basis. She is an active researcher with two sole published books: An
        Aesthesia of Networks (MIT Press, 2013), and  Materializing
        New Media  (Dartmouth College Press 2006). Her current research
        interests are: networked experience, media arts and theory, data and radical
        empiricism, nonhuman and perception, new pragmatist approaches to media andArt.

        Anna regularly collaborates artistically with Michele Barker in
        the School of Media Arts, COFA. Barker and Munster are working on a large-scale
        multi-channel interactive work, HocusPocus, which explores the relations
        between perception, magic and the brain. They have been awarded a New Work
        Grant, 2010, from the Australia Council for the Arts to realise this work.
        Recent collaborative projects include: Duchenne’s smile (2-channel DV
        installation, 2009), The Love Machine II (photomedia installation, 2008–1¬0),
        Struck (3-channel DV installation, 2007).
        She is a partner in a large international project, Immediations <http://senselab.ca/wp2/immediations/>, hosted
        by Concordia University, Montreal and funded by the Social Science and
        Humanities Research Council, Canada. She has held two ARC Discovery research
        grants in new media and art: 'The Body-Machine Interface in New Media Art from
        1984 to the Present, 2003–5' and 'Dynamic Media: Innovative social and artistic
        uses of dynamic media in Australia, Britain, Canada and Scandinavia since
        1990'.  She is also an investigator on an ARC Linkage project,
        'Australian Media Arts Database', which will utilise innovative user-lead and
        open source databases to create a history of Australian media arts in an
        international context.

        She is a founding member of the online peer-reviewed
        journal The Fibreculture Journal <http://fibreculturejournal.org/> and has co-edited two special issues on Distributed
        Aesthetics  <http://seven.fibreculturejournal.org/>and Web 2.0 <http://fourteen.fibreculturejournal.org/>. and on the editorial advisory
        board of LeonardoBooks (MIT Press), Inflexions, CTheory,
        Convergence, and Scan

        Randall Packer (US) Since the 1980s, multimedia artist, composer, writer and educator Randall
        Packer has worked at the intersection of interactive media, live performance,
        and networked art. He has received critical acclaim for his socially and
        politically infused critique of media culture, and has performed and exhibited
        at museums, theaters, and festivals internationally, including: NTT
        InterCommunication Center (Tokyo), ZKM Center for Art & Media (Karlsruhe),
        Walker Art Center, (Minneapolis), Corcoran Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), The
        Kitchen (New York City), ZERO1 Biennial (San Jose), Transmediale Festival of
        Media (Berlin), and Theater Artaud (San Francisco). Packer is a writer and
        scholar in new media, most notably the co-editor of Multimedia: From Wagner to
        Virtual Reality and the author of his long running blog: Reportage from the
        Aesthetic Edge. He has written extensively for publications including: MIT
        Press, Johns Hopkins University Press, the Leonardo Journal for the Arts &
        Sciences, LINK, ART LIES, Hyperallergic, and Cambridge University Press. He
        holds an MFA and PhD in music composition and has taught multimedia at the
        University of California Berkeley, Maryland Institute College of Art, American
        University, California Institute of the Arts, Johns Hopkins University, The
        Museum of Modern Art, and most recently at Nanyang Technological University
        (NTU) in Singapore. At NTU, he is an Associate Professor of Networked Art where
        he founded and directs the Open Source Studio (OSS) project, an educational
        initiative exploring collaborative online research and teaching in the media
        arts. At NTU, he organized the Art of the Networked Practice | Online
        Symposium, a global event which featured participants from more than 40
        countries around the world. Currently he is organizing the Third Space Network
        (3SN), an Internet broadcast channel for live media arts and creative dialogue.

        Ana Valdes (UR) Ana Valdes writer
        Art curator and social anthropologist born in Uruguay and political prisoner
        during several years. Lived in Sweden and became engaged in the Palestinian
        struggle for an own state. Now she is working with a former inmate of
        Guantanamo writing a book and making a film.

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

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