[-empyre-] Welcome to November: On Contamination

[Renate Terese Ferro]

Welcome to November 2017 on –empyre- soft-skinned space
Contamination Moderated by Renate Ferro with guests
Week 1: November 5: Marisa Tesauro (DE, US), Catherine Grau (IT, US) 
Week 2:November 12 Bishnupriya Ghosh (US), Tim Murray (US)
Week 3: November 19 Rahul Mukherjee, Andrea Haenggi (DE,US) 
Week 4: November 26 Amy Sara Carroll (US), Ricardo Dominguez (US), Melinda Rackham (AU), Christina McPhee (US) 
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. We ask our  –empyre- soft-skinned space guests and subscribers to consider what it might take to detox from contamination on a local and regional level but also beyond to our global world. How can we consider the theoretical and actual construct of contamination as it relates to the flow between real and virtual networks. How can artists, poets, writers, philosophers, theorists, and others think through contamination to imagine the potentials for the future?
Moderator: 

Renate Ferro  (US) is a conceptual artist working in emerging technology and culture. Most recently her work has been featured at The Freud Museum (London), The Dorksy Gallery (NY), The Hemispheric Institute and FOMMA (Mexico), The Janus Pannonius Muzeum (Hungary), and The Free University Berlin (Germany). Her work has been published in such journals as Diacritics, Theatre Journal, and Epoch. She is a managing moderator for the online new media list serve -empyre-soft-skinned space. Ferro is a Visiting Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Art at Cornell University teaching digital media and theory. She also directs the Tinker Factory, a creative research lab for Interdisciplinary Research.

Weekly Guests: 
Amy Sara Carroll (US) is the author of two collections of poetry SECESSION (Hyperbole Books, an imprint of San Diego State University Press, 2012) and FANNIE + FREDDIE/The Sentimentality of Post-9/11 Pornography (Fordham University Press, 2013), chosen by Claudia Rankine for the 2012 Poets Out Loud Prize. Since 2008, she has been a member of Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab, coproducing the Transborder Immigrant Tool, which has been included in several art exhibitions, including the 2010 California Biennial. With EDT 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab and the University of Michigan interdisciplinary workshop, the Border Collective, she collaboratively authored [({    })] The Desert Survival Series/La serie de sobrevivencia del desierto (The Office of Net Assessment/University of Michigan Digital Environments Cluster Publishing Series, 2014), that digitally has been redistributed under its Creative Commons license by CTheory Books (2015), the Electronic Literature Collection, Vol. 3 (2016),
CONACULTA E-Literatura/Centro de Cultura Digital (2016), and HemiPress (2017). In 2015, Carroll served as the University of Mississippi Summer Poet in Residence. Summer 2010 and every summer thereafter, she has participated in Mexico City’s alternative arts space SOMA. Carroll’s monograph REMEX: Toward an Art History of
the NAFTA Era is forthcoming from the University of Texas Press in December 2017 under the auspices of its Mellon Latin American and Caribbean
Arts and Culture publishing initiative. Currently, Carroll is a 2017-2018 Society Fellow at Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities where she is working on two projects: “Codeswitch,” a mixed genre collection, coauthored with Ricardo Dominguez, that undocuments the development and
distribution of the Transborder Immigrant Tool; and “Global Mexico’s Coproduction,” the second volume in a trilogy that she’s
composing on greater Mexican art, literature, and cinema.

Ricardo Dominguez (US) is a co-founder of The Electronic Disturbance Theater, a group who developed virtual sit-in technologies in solidarity with the Zapatistas communities in Chiapas, Mexico, in 1998. Dominguez developed his recent Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab project titled The
Transborder Immigrant Tool (a GPS cell phone safety net tool for crossing the Mexico/U.S. border) with Brett Stalbaum, Micha Cárdenas, Amy
Sara Carroll, and Elle Mehrmand (http://tbt.tome.press/). The project was the winner of the Transnational Communities Award (2008), an award funded by Cultural Contact,
Endowment for Culture Mexico–U.S. and handed out by the U.S. Embassy in Mexico.

Along with artists Diane Ludin, Nina Waisman, and Amy Sara Carroll, Dominguez is also a co-founder of particle group, the creator of an art project about
nanotoxicology titled Particles of Interest: Tales of the Matter Market (http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/particle-group-intro). Dominguez
is an associate professor in the visual arts department and M.F.A. director at the University of California–San Diego, a Hellman Fellow, principal
investigator at Qualcomm Institute/California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, and a Society for the Humanities Fellow at Cornell
University (2017–18) and Rockefeller Arts and Literary Fellow (2018 - 19).

Bishnupriya Ghosh (US) teaches  global media studies at UC Santa Barbara’s Departments of English and Global Studies. Her first monograph, When Borne Across: Literary Cosmopolitics in the Contemporary Indian Novel (Rutgers UP, 2004) addressed cultural globalization and the market for world literatures; and her second,  Global Icons: Apertures into the Global (Duke UP, 2011) focused on globally circulating iconic images that constitute media environments. Around 2009, Ghosh turned to research on risk media from perspectives in the humanities. Both her current projects arise from this turn: she is writing her third monograph, *The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media,* and co-editing *The Routledge Handbook on Media and Risk* (forthcoming 2018).

Catherine Grau (DE, US) works as interdisciplinary artist, facilitator, and curator in the overlapping fields of critical pedagogy, feminist somatic practices, post-industrial ecology and land use – focused on re-imagining / re-claiming relationships to land and re-covering /re-embodying marginalized modes of knowing. Her practice and projects emerge from and situate within context / place, often employing installation, props, signage, public actions, workshops, encounters, and performance scores as a means of facilitating shifts in thinking, behavior and perception.

Catherine holds a BFA in sculpture from Pratt Institute and a MFA in Public Art and New Artistic Strategies from the Bauhaus University. She is engaged in a long-term collaboration with artist Zoe Kreye in an on-going project called “Unlearning Practices”. In 2015 Catherine co-founded Chance Ecologies – a curatorial
platform for artistic research on ecological adaptation and resilience in post-industrial / post-human sites and landfills in New York City, which involves over 20 artists. In 2017 she co-founded the artist collective EPA – Environmental Performance Agency, together with andrea haenggi, Ellie Irons, Christopher Kennedy, and the urban weeds of 1067 Pacific Street, which explores narratives of multi-species agency, embodied and somatic forms of knowing, and environmental activism.

Andrea Haenggi CH, US) Andrea s a Brooklyn-based artist and choreographer from Switzerland, who has been making work independently and collaboratively since 1998. She is known for pushing boundaries. Her work deals with kinesthesia, affect, perception and sensation in the digital age. Since two years her performers and co-creators are with spontaneous urban plants. The choreographic practice shoots out to explore themes of feminism, immigration, colonization and vegetal philosophies. The
radicle goes into the cracks, looking at value, emotional labor and care. She has been commissioned to create performances for Dance Theater Workshop (New York), the Queens Museum (New York), MASS MoCA (North Adams), the Transart Triennial (Berlin), New Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow), SPAN Festival (Lagos, Nigeria) among many others. She is the catalyst of the research and performance laboratory 1067 PacificPeople in Brooklyn. She taught movement workshops in the
USA, Berlin, Zurich, China and Nigeria and is on the faculty of the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies in New York. Haenggi holds a MFA in Creative Practice from Transart Institute/Plymouth University UK and is a Swiss Canton Solothurn Dance Price 2008 recipient. http://weedychoreography.com <http://weedychoreography.com/> ; http://andreahaenggi.net <http://andreahaenggi.net/> ; http://1067pacificpeople.nyc <http://1067pacificpeople.nyc/>

Christina McPhee’s images move from within a matrix of abstraction, shadowing figures and contingent effects. Her work emulates potential forms of life, in various systems and territories, and in real and imagined ecologies.

Christina McPhee’s work is in the museum collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New Museum-Rhizome Artbase, and International Center for Photography, New York; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City; and Thresholds New Media Collection, Scotland. Solo museum exhibitions include the American University Museum, Washington, D.C., and Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden. She has participated in group exhibitions, notably with documenta 12 (Magazine Project), Bucharest Biennial 3, Museum of Modern Art Medellin, Bildmuseet Umea, Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, California Museum of Photography/Digital Studio, and the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), London. Born in Pomona, California in 1954, she studied at Scripps College, Claremont and Kansas City Art Institute (BFA); she was a student of Philip Guston during his last year of life and teaching, at Boston University (MFA painting 1979).  She has taught at Kansas City Art Institute and the
University of California-Santa Cruz in the Digital Arts and New Media MFA program.  In 2012, she won a MAP Fund for Performance grant with Pamela Z,
for the production of Carbon Song Cycle, which premiered at Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive and at Roulette, Brooklyn, in 2013.  She lives and works inCalifornia.
Christina McPhee: A Commonplace Book <https://punctumbooks.com/titles/christina-mcphee-a-commonplace-book/> is forthcoming in fall, 2017
with Punctum Books. 
http://www.christinamcphee.net <http://www.christinamcphee.net/>

Rahul Mukherjee

Tim Murray (US) is Professor of Comparative Literature and English and Curator of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art in the Cornell Library. A curator of new media and contemporary art, and theorist of visual studies and digital culture, he has been forging international intersections in exhibition and print between the arts, humanities, and technology for over twenty-five years. He is currently the Director of Cornell Council for the Arts. He has been a moderator for -empyre since 2007..

A recipient of fellowships and grants from NEA, NEH, Mellon, Rockefeller, Fulbright, and Korea National Research Foundation, Murray is currently working on a book, Archival Events @ New Media Art, which is a sequel to Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds (Minnesota, 2008).  Among his publications are the books Medium Philosophicum: Thinking Art Technologically (Universidad de Murcia, forthcoming, 2017), Zonas de Contacto: el arte en CD-Rom (Centro de la Imagen, 1999), Drama Trauma: Specters of Race and Sexuality in Performance, Video, Art (Routledge, 1997), Like a Film: Ideological Fantasy on Screen, Camera, and Canvas (Routledge, 1993), Theatrical Legitimation: Allegories of Genius In XVIIth-Century England and France (Oxford, 1987), ed. with Alan Smith, Repossessions: Psychoanalysis and the Phantasms of Early-Modern Culture (Minnesota, 1998), ed., Mimesis, Masochism & Mime: The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought (Michigan, 1997), ed. Xu Bing’s Background Story and his Oeuvre (Mandarin), co-edited with Yang Shin-Yi (Beijing: Life Bookstore Publishing, 2016), and ed. with Irving Goh of The Prepositional Senses of Jean-Luc Nancy, 2 Vols., diacritics (2014-16).


Melinda Rackham (AU)
When the internet was young Melinda Rackham wove tales of intimacy and identity online.  Her Phd investigated the soft bounds of virtual reality space and she founded the global -empyre- forum. She was ACMI’s first Network Art curator and led Australia’s foremost art and technology organization, ANAT. Melinda writes on social justice and
contemporary art, making and design. Her recent publications Catherine Truman -Touching Distance, explores the many facets of a jeweller working with medical
researchers, while the ADOPTED anthology presents poetry and prose from adult adoptees on loss, trauma and reclaiming self.

Currently Adjunct Research Professor in the University of South Australia’s School of Art, Architecture and Design she divides her time between Adelaide and Pukatja (Ernabella) in the Central Australian APY Lands.

Marisa Tesauro (IT,US) is an artist who works in sculpture, installation and site-specific intervention. Her work examines contemporary societies and the built environment and she often works in collaboration with other professionals in the fields of archeology and anthropology. Her work reflects on the dynamics of ruin, relics and debris for their unique way of telling history despite being only fragments of a bigger story and the intersection of nature´s course and the intervention of man at play. Her work
also questions what we use and consume, how we use objects and navigate our built environments focusing on the consumption-waste cycle.

Marisa has participated in a number of projects with Chance Ecologies, a curatorial platform for artistic research on ecological adaptation and resilience in post-industrial / post-human sites and landfills in New York City, which involves over 20 artists including her project Construction Burial Sites: This Immense, Organic Sprawl at the Queens Museum of Art and the site-specific intervention of the same project at Hunters Point South in Queens. Her Solo exhibition in conjunction with the University
of Florence Department of Archeology at the Museum La Specola in Florence entitled Miti Oggi Ruderi Domani included a number of works and an installation that were based on the consumption-waste cycle as objects and spaces are today´s legends and tomorrow’s ruins. Other exhibitions include Scent, Dickinson Roundell, NY, NY, Bay Ridge SAW, NY, NY, A Remix of Abundance: Constructing Sustainability, ARTECHO, NY, NY, BRONX CALLING:THE SECOND AIM BIENNIAL, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY, Out of the Ruins: Reimagining the Romantic Tradition, Newton Art Center, Newton, MA , This Side of Paradise, No Longer Empty at The Andrew Freedman Home, Bronx, NY and Via Roma 2 <https://maps.google.com/?q=Via+Roma+2&entry=gmail&source=g>, Site-specific Installation in Monasterace, Italy. Tesauro has published two artist books, Strutture, with Content Series and Relics in the Construction of Place based on her research for the Construction Burial Sites at Hunter´s
Point South. She has recently participated in NYFA Bootcamp and her awards and residencies include Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant, Studio
in the Park residency at the Queens Museum, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant, AIM Program at the Bronx Museum, Full
Fellowship Award Vermont Studio Center, amongst others. Marisa Tesauro holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and is represented by the Artist
Pension Trust.




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