[-empyre-] Welcome to Week 3

[Renate Terese Ferro]

Dear –empyre- subscribers and guests,  
Thanks to all of you who have posted this past week.  As I mentioned earlier this morning these questions have been lurking in my mind.  Wondering if any of you out there have some thoughts. What is the relationship between contamination, hazardous conditions, and toxicity.  What condition can our bodies and the environments that we live in flush out contamination, toxicity and these hazardous entities?   Can the humanities and arts, digital media and technology help us to detox from these situations or are there instances when they may exacerbate conditions?  
Random threads are always welcomed to be introduces as long as they are on our topic of contamination.  This is a list serv so feel free to extend our guests’ posts and introduce others that you might have.  

Thank you to Bishnupriya Ghosh, Tim Murray, and Christina McPhee for helping to think about media this week.  Welcoming Rahul Mukherjee and Andrea Haenggi to our soft-skinned virtual space to continue our discussion through Week 3. Rahul is a writer and theorist and this year a Fellow at Cornell’s Society for the Humanities.  Rahul will be intermittently chiming in throughout the week as he will in and out of range.  We are also thrilled to welcome Andrea Haenggi an artist and choreographer.  Looking forward to continuing especially with both of their interests and expertise in movement, boundaries, colonization, and media. Their biographies are below. 
Renate 

Biographies: 
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/>

Rahul Mukherjee (IN, US) Rahul Mukherjee is Assistant Professor of television and new media studies at Penn Cinema Studies program. He teaches and researches about environmental media and mobile media technologies. His published articles deal with mediating chronic toxicities related to chemical disasters (Bhopal) and media coverage of debates about nuclear energy in India. 


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