[-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 167, Issue 2

[Timothy Conway Murray]

Elizabeth Wijaya wrote  "On Kate's point on deep time and the danger of obscuring/forgetting
historical subjugation and social inequality,  maybe there is also such a
thing as mountain time that's inhabited and experienced differently by
people attracted to mountains for the sublime/universal time or as in
Chiang's film, for the duration of survival."

Something I've been discussing with artists and students over the past couple of months are the traversals and transversals of duration as cross-inhabited by differing populations and by differing epistemologies.  While nature frequently has been figured vis à vis the "sublime" or the "universal," its understanding remains contingent on the populations inhabiting it.  Just as "understanding" itself carries the footprint of historically fraught philosophical traditions.  For Liz's cinematic characters, habitation runs contrary to the inhibitions of constrained passage and labor.  Flight itself is both liberatory and terroristic depending on whether the look goes backward or forward.  But in this case, the artistic engine still might remain to be tied to "projection" in relation to "distance" or "distancing."  I'm wondering whether this isn't a peculiarly cinematic condition, one that signals the historical discussion of the gaze in all of its complexities.  Might Chiang's cinematography and still off something different?  

Along the lines of plastic arts, I'm also wondering whether the counter-to-deep time of indigenous art might not signal something different both in apparatus and epistemology? In this case, duration itself might be running still and flowing deep but not in the sense of 'movement' or 'perspectival depth.'  Just a thought provoked by Kate and Liz's posts.

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
 
B-1 West Sibley Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853
 
 

On 11/7/18, 1:16 PM, "empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of Elizabeth Wijaya" <empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of ew388 at cornell.edu> wrote:

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