[-empyre-] Week 3 Introduction

[Junting Huang]

Thanks to Eleonora, Wenhua, and Joo Yun for your posts! I’m sorry about the slow pace in the second week, but please feel free to follow up on their posts anytime. The annual meeting of Society for Cinema and Media Studies ended today in Toronto, and we are back in week 3. I am excited to introduce the guests for this week. They are Nicholas Knouf, Norie Neumark, Ryan Jordan, Sarah Simpson, and Gianluca Pulsoni.

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Nicholas Knouf

Nicholas Knouf is an Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at Wellesley College in Wellesley, MA. He is a media scholar and artist researching noise, interferences, boundaries, and limits in media technologies and communication.

His recent book, How Noise Matters to Finance (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), traced how the concept of “noise” in the sonic and informatic domains of finance mutated throughout the late 20th century into the 21st. His current research project, tentatively entitled At the Limits of Understanding, listens to how we have tried to communicate with both ghosts and aliens.

His current artistic research explores the re-presentation of signals from the cosmos. Projects in this vein include they transmitted continuously / but our times rarely aligned / and their signals dissipated in the æther (2018-present), a 20 channel sound art installation with speakers made from handmade abaca paper and piezo electric elements, with sounds collected from satellite transmissions; PIECES FOR PERFORMER(S) AND EXTRATERRESTRIAL ENTITIES (2017-present), event scores laser etched into handmade translucent abaca paper; and, On your wrist is the universe (2017-present), generative poetry about satellites and the cosmos for your smartwatch.

Norie Neumark 

Norie Neumark is a sound/media artist and theorist.  Her radiophonic works have been commissioned and broadcast in Australia (ABC) and in the US. Her collaborative art practice with Maria Miranda (www.out-of-sync.com) has been commissioned and exhibited nationally and internationally. Her sound studies research is currently focused on voice and the new materialist turn. Her latest writing on voice is Voicetracks: Attuning to Voice in Media and the Arts (MIT Press, 2017). She is an Honorary Professorial Fellow at VCA and Emeritus Professor, La Trobe University, Melbourne, and the founding editor of Unlikely: Journal for Creative Arts. http://unlikely.net.au

Ryan Jordan

Ryan Jordan creates powerful audio-visual performance experiences explicitly attempting to access portals into the psychedelic reality matrix. These are explored through experiments in Possession Trance, retro-death-telegraphy, hylozoistic neural computation and derelict electronics. Recent projects include engram_extraction, a hypothetical experiment into extracting and recording the biophysical and/or biochemical imprints of events on memory; and several failed attempts at breeding basilisks, mythical reptiles with a lethal gaze or breath, hatched by a serpent from a cock's egg. He disseminates these experiments via his noise=noise / nnnnn platform for live events and workshops currently based in Ipswich UK, and via a PhD thesis being completed at the School Of Creative Media in Hong Kong.
http://ryanjordan.org/
http://nnnnn.org.uk/

Sarah Simpson

Sarah Simpson holds as Master's Degree in the History of Art from University College London and a Bachelor's Degree in both Art History and Archaeology from Cornell University. Originally from Binghamton, NY, she currently resides in Brooklyn, NY. Sarah has held a range of positions in the art world including Curatorial Assistant, Gallery Manager, and, most recently, Publicist. She's worked in The Whitney Museum of American Art, BRIC, Didier Aaron, and Blue Medium. Sarah has a personal blog, as well, where she writes about exhibitions and theoretical concepts that strike her interest, such as museum gift shops (which are absolutely fascinating): https://ecloart.wordpress.com/   

Gianluca Pulsoni

Gianluca Pulsoni is a Ph.D. student in the Romance Studies Department of Cornell University (Italian section). He holds an MA in Cultural Anthropology from the University La Sapienza in Rome, Italy, with a thesis on Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi's cinema and exhibitions. He is a contributing writer to the Italian newspaper, Il Manifesto -- its cultural pages and weekly, Alias. Also, he has experience working with digital companies and publishing houses in Italy as editor and translator.

all the best
Junting