[-empyre-] Contamination, Toxic Assets, Hazardous Waste: AND MEDIAL ART

[Timothy Conway Murray]

Thanks, Renate, for reflecting on the commonalities of our thoughts on contamination and toxic assets.  It’s great to be back in dialogue with Christina who steered the –empyre- platform for many years and with whom Renate and I enjoyed collaborating.  Bishnu’s work on toxicity and contamination was on my mind last week when I participated with Alex Taek-Gwang Lee on a panel about the exhibition of Fahrenttin Orenli, “Money Without Nationality,” at Art Sonje Center in Seoul.  Among the themes of the multimedia exhibition are how money and oil have permeated, contaminated, everyday life in cities, not to mention the art world.  Most telling was one sculpture in which Orenli wrapped small models of skyscrapers in printed condoms so that the exterior of the city read as prophylactic.  While my response was to read this piece as a figuration of the phallologocentrism driving corporate culture and, indeed, the current American government, the artist explained that his aim in exhibiting this electronic sculpture was to represent how corporate culture protects itself from critical reflections on the extent of its redefinition of urban life just as the urban passerby tends of walk by the monuments of urban capital without stopping to reflect on the implications of their social and cultural contamination.  It is exciting for –empyre- to pause this month to emphasize this very reflection, whose networks range from the biomedical and biopolitical to the artistic and the governmental

I join Renate in encouraging our –empyre- subscribers to pause in the daily passage through networked culture to share their reflections on contamination, mediality, and toxic “assets.”  It would be very interesting for our featured guests this week, Bishnu and Christina, to hear some of your thoughts.

Best,

Tim

Timothy Murray
Director, Cornell Council for the Arts and Curator, CCA Biennial
http://cca.cornell.edu
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art 
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu <http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu/>
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
 
114 West Sibley Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853
 
2017-18 International Sea-Sky Scholar, School of Architecture and Fine Art, Dalian University of Technology, China
 

On 11/19/17, 11:52 AM, "empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of Renate Ferro" <empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of rferro at cornell.edu> wrote:

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