[-empyre-] -empyre- a digital unconscious?

[Renate Terese Ferro]

Thanks Simon from New Zealand, 
Your verbose nonsensical yet poetic and powerfully political rants threaded together, to the point, never dull but always provocative, sometimes incomprehensible, yet direct, welcomed today from Ithaca, cold, blustery, freezing, icy, gray upon gray mist.  
Renate

(it's cold and snowy but beautifully sunny in Ithaca, New York, today)
cicadas & humid grey skies Waiheke Island, New Zealand, today. 2 boys killed in flashflooding in the Waitakere ranges, Auckland cityside: the persistent promise of disruptive events that is now our weather, now our environment. 

<<empyre>> ... I think of Altavista, the cathode ray tube monitor and clicketty-clack keyboard, of the public computer at Brazil cafe before I opened the doors most mornings dialing in to engage with the textvoices coming down the wire early in the 2000s when I discovered the listserv, starting a blog as clearinghouse, again public, winging it, butterflies waiting for the next installment, about the same time: squarewhiteworld.com ... halcyon days / mornings of digital connectivity, when it seemed to involve and devolve on actual and sometimes anxious connections, rather than recognitions, reassurances and reaffirmations of the lugubriously sincere (like-able if not amiable) variety. When the wire ran hot with debate rains of actual and sometimes burning butterflies. More popping bubbles than cognitive ones. And I hazard that that's why I like the listserv format still ... the possibility of an unforeseen intervention upstarting, derailing more sanguine settled and yes conservative (recuperative) discussion ... The risk of going too far, the highwire, not preempted by the provision of safetynetting. As for expertise and theoretical enterprise, was more like a fleamarket, with barrackers, professional and simulacral, in the softskinned space of egalitarian exchange, each equally un-niched and in a context the construct of all--permitting that is words of other unknown because unknowable provenance (owing to textonly format): who does ____ think she is? who will ____ be? before personological recidivism and identitarian backlash of social online presence. There it is: a virtual I have misspelt as "possibility"! 

...there would also be something to say about professional overinvestment more recently actively soliciting recognition, remediation, affirmations; rather than an increasing reign of expert opinion, the soft sentimental professionally bleeding heart's thin skin: so, rather than its lateral level and smooth openness to both professional and expert, invited or lurking, <<empyre>> might be lauded for the potential to engage in ... risk. It could be a more dangerous place, this smooth one. Reputations might, at least locally, be on line ... the long hidden but fragile threads of glass that link us serving in listserv the needling of consistency and consensus ... crawling back into the cave of the screen after the fall ... grace

taking a certain time to reflect in private vacuole of that's not what I meant at all ...

Best,
Simon




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

On 2/4/18, 11:19 PM, "empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of Simon" <empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of SWHTaylor at zoho.com> wrote:

    ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------