[-empyre-] Refiguring the Future: Last Thoughts and Thank You

[Sarah Watson]

As we close out the month of March on –empyre–, I want to express my
gratitude to all of our guests who have participated over the last
four weeks and to my co-moderator, Lola Martinez. Thank you all so
much for sharing your work and for providing such valuable insights.
Since we did not have all of our guests and weekly themes flushed out
when we introduced the topic of Refiguring the Future at beginning of
the month, below is a recap that includes the weekly topics and guest
bios.

I want to end by pausing on Francesca’s post and her discussion of
recent events “happening ‘outside’ art - that is, if we think that
there is an inside and outside to art.” Moving beyond a siloed idea of
art and an inside and outside, her post makes clear that in our
current moment there is a great necessitate to think and do towards
refiguring the future. As Francesca states at the end of her post,
“So, to return to where I started from, in thinking about these events
over the past 2 weeks I have no words about art or collective art
practices, but I sense that these events, and what flows from them -
socially, politically, imaginatively - will seep into and inflect
thinking and writing and making, both personal and collective
projects. For there is no separation between art and life, it's the
same thing.”

With gratitude,

Sarah

Sarah Watson
Director of Exhibitions & Chief Curator
Hunter College Art Galleries, New York

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
March 2019
“Refiguring the Future”

Week 1: Exhibition as Ecosystem
Guests: Heather Dewey-Hagborg (US) and Dorothy R. Santos (US),
co-curators of “Refiguring the Future”

Week 2:  In/Visibility feature
Guests: Ezra Benus (US), Anneli Goeller (US), Yidan Zeng (曽一丹) (US)

Week 3: Hackability of the body
Guests: Lee Blalock (US), Kathy High (US), Camilla Mørk Røstvik (UK)

Week 4: Collectivity and World-building
Guests: Emmy Catedral (US); Sofía Córdova (US); Shirin Fahimi (CA); In
Her Interior (Virginia Barratt (AUS) and Francesca da Rimini (AUS));
PJ GUBATINA POLICARPIO (US); and Addie Wagenknecht (US, AT)

Guest  Bios:
EZRA BENUS studied at the Bezalel Academy of Art in Jerusalem, the
University of Amsterdam, and graduated with a degree in Studio Art
(honors) and Jewish Studies at CUNY Hunter College. Benus was an Erich
Fromm Fellow at Paideia Institute in Stockholm, and is currently the
Access and Adult Learning Fellow at the Brooklyn Museum. He has spoken
publicly about his art practice and disability arts activism at venues
such as CUE Art Foundation, York College, and Princeton University. He
has exhibited and performed nationally and internationally at a number
of venues, including Jerusalem, Stockholm, New York, Dayton, and
Calgary.

LEE BLALOCK is a Chicago-based artist and educator who
presentsalternative and hyphenated states of being through
technology-mediated processes. Inspired by science fiction, futurism,
and technology, her work is an exercise in body modification by way of
amplified behavior or "change-of-state." Blalock also works under the
moniker L[3]^2, whose most recent live work embraces noise and fissure
as a natural state of being for bodies living in the information age.
Superimposing custom module-based "Instr/augment" systems (what the
artist calls “sy5z3ns”) onto performers, L[3]^2 creates conditions for
meditation through generative and repetitive behavior. Blalock is an
Assistant Professor in the Art and Technology Studies Department at
the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She holds an MFA from the
School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BS from Spelman College,
Atlanta.

EMMY CATEDRAL (US) was born in Butuan and raised in Butuan and Iloilo
City, Philippines before immigrating to New York City at the age
often. She is an artist and writer working in performance and
installation with things made with paper, including books. Catedral
presents collaborative projects as The Explorers Club of Enrique de
Malacca, and The Amateur Astronomers Society of Voorhees and she also
presents work as Y2K (with Carlos Rigau and Jocelyn Spaar).She is
co-founder, with PJ Gubatina Policarpio, of the Pilipinx American
Library, which recently completed summer residencies at Wendy's
Subway, Brooklyn, and the Asian Art Museum, SF.

Born in 1985 in Carolina, Puerto Rico and currently based in Oakland,
California, SOFIA CORDOVA's (US) work considers sci-fi and futurity,
dance and music culture(s), the internet, mystical things, extinction
and mutation, migration, and climate change under the conditions of
late capitalism and its technologies. She first moved to the US to
attend the early college program at Simon's Rock College of Bard in
Great Barrington, Massachusetts. She completed her BFA at St. John’s
University in conjunction with the International Center for
Photography in New York City in 2006. In 2010 She received her MFA
from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. She has
exhibited and performed at SFMOMA, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts,
the Berkeley Art Museum, the Arizona State University Museum, the
Vincent Price Museum, and other venues internationally such as Art Hub
in Shanghai and the MEWO Kunsthalle in Germany. She is one half of the
music duo, XUXA SANTAMARIA. In addition to discrete projects,
performances, and albums the duo collectively scores all of her video
and performance work.

DR. HEATHER DEWEY-HAGBORG is a transdisciplinary artist and educator
who is interested in art as research and critical practice. Her
controversial biopolitical art practice includes the project Stranger
Visions in which she created portrait sculptures from analyses of
genetic material (hair, cigarette butts, chewed up gum) collected in
public places. Heather has shown work internationally at events and
venues including the World Economic Forum, the Daejeon Biennale, the
Guangzhou Triennial, and the Shenzhen Urbanism and Architecture
Biennale, the Van Abbemuseum, Transmediale and PS1 MOMA. Her work is
held in public collections of the Centre Pompidou, the Victoria and
Albert Museum, and the New York Historical Society, among others, and
has been widely discussed in the media, from the New York Times and
the BBC to Art Forum and Wired. Heather has a PhD in Electronic Arts
from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

SHIRIN FAHIMI (CA) is a Toronto based visual artist, born and raised
in Iran, working across the mediums of video, installation and
performance. She is also a co-founder of Taklif: تکلیف ,  an imaginary
space and a traveling library for radical imaginations. She received
her BA from Slade School of Fine Art (University College London) and
her MFA from Concordia University. Practicing with diagrams and
archival materials, Shirin’s current research is concerned with the
performative aspect of Sihr (magic) and divination in Islamic culture
as a source of politico-aesthetic transformation, empowerment, and
identification.

ANNELI GOELLER is an artist who uses 3D simulation and artificial
intelligence to speculate that the creation of algorithmic selves
expands the concept of personhood. They have been exhibited
internationally at institutions such as the Sheila C. Johnson Design
Center in New York, Peripheral Forms in Portland, Lithium Gallery in
Chicago as well as the Palazzo dei Cartelloni in Florence. In virtual
space their work has been featured in The Wrong - New Digital Art
Biennale and The Universal Sea. They are currently a MFA candidate in
Film, Video, New Media, Animation at the School of the Art Institute
of Chicago.

PJ GUBATINA POLICARPIO (US) is an educator, curator, and community
organizer. He designs spaces for critical and thoughtful interactions
between communities, artists, and art. Born in the Philippines, PJ
works between New York and San Francisco; the Lenape and Ohlone
homelands. You can learn more about his work at pjpolicarpio.net. He
is co-founder, with Emmy Catedral, of the Pilipinx American Library.

KATHY HIGH is an interdisciplinary artist working in the areas of
technology, science, speculative fiction and art. She produces videos
and installations posing queer and feminist inquiries into areas of
medicine/bio-science, and animal/interspecies collaborations. She
hosts bio/ecology+art workshops and is creating an urban nature center
in North Troy (NATURE Lab) with media organization The Sanctuary for
Independent Media. High is Professor of Video and New Media in the
Department of Arts, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. She
teaches documentary and experimental digital video production, history
and theory, as well as biological arts.

In Her Interior (VIRGINIA BARRATT and FRANCESCA DA RIMINI) (AUS):
Formed in 2015, IHI co-creates and performs live works of spoken,
sung, and recorded text and video within site-specific installation
environments. As two of the four co-founders of cyber-feminist group
VNS Matrix (est. 1991), da Rimini and Barratt have contributed to
critiques of gender and technology for over three decades. In 2016, on
the occasion of the 25th anniversary of VNS Matrix’s A Cyberfeminist
Manifesto for the 21st Century, the group wrote and performed a new
text, titled “A Tender Hex for the Anthropocene,” and curated a
special section on affective labor for Runway magazine. Virginia
Barratt is a writer and performer based in the Northern Rivers region
of NSW, Australia. She is writing a PhD at Western Sydney University
in the Writing and Society Research Centre. Francesca da Rimini is an
artist, researcher and makes work using various media including text,
video, and computers.

DR. CAMILLA MØRK RØSTVIK is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the
School of Art History at the University of St Andrews. She works on
the visual culture and institutional power structures of menstruation
from 1970s to the present day.

DOROTHY R. SANTOS is a Filipinx American writer, curator, and
researcher whose academic interests include digital art, computational
media, and biotechnology. Born and raised in San Francisco,
California, she holds Bachelor’s degrees in Philosophy and Psychology
from the University of San Francisco and received her Master’s degree
in Visual and Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts.
She is currently a Ph.D. student in Film and Digital Media at the
University of California, Santa Cruz as a Eugene V. Cota-Robles
fellow. Her work appears in art21, Art Practical, Rhizome,
Hyperallergic, Ars Technica, Vice Motherboard, and SF MOMA’s Open Space.

ADDIE WAGENKNECHT (US, AT) is a co-founder of both REFRESH and Deep
Lab. Her work explores the tension between expression and technology.
She seeks to blend conceptual work with forms of hacking and
sculpture. Previous exhibitions include MuseumsQuartier Wien, Vienna,
Austria; La Gaîté Lyrique, Paris, France; The Istanbul Modern;
Whitechapel Gallery, London and MU, Eindhoven, Netherlands. In 2016
she collaborated with Chanel and I-D magazine as part of their Sixth
Sense series and in 2017 her work was acquired by the Whitney Museum
for American Art.

YIDAN ZENG (曽一丹) is an intimacy investigator currently
wandering/wondering through New York. She uses fabric, movement, and
touch to explore multi-sensual forms for connection. She's been a
Digital Accessibility Fellow with Lincoln Center for the Performing
Arts (2017), a Create Change Fellow with The Laundromat Project
(2018), a visiting glass artist at The University of Hawai'i in Mānoa
(2018), and a recipient of the Queens Arts Intervention Grant (2019).
She’s also half of a performance duo, Os&En, and has performed in
Miami, Providence, and on and off the streets of NYC. Yidan received
her BA and BFA from the Brown-RISD Dual Degree Program in Computer
Science and Glass.

Moderator Bios:
LOLA MARTINEZ is a Cuban-American curator and researcher working at
the intersection of art and technology. Recent curatorial projects
include the Refiguring the Future Conference, Kaye Playhouse and
Knockdown Center, NY (2019), los contenedores (no) son mejores vacíos,
WXBC and The Hessel Museum of Art, NY (2017), aCCeSsions, Knockdown
Center (2017), We are the Margins, P! and Beverly’s, NY (2017),
amongst others. Their current research project, Tropical Hardware
focuses on the geopolitics of sub-tropical and tropical zones to trace
how perceptions of tropicality are reconfigured by the development and
implementation of digital media and technology. Martinez is the
inaugural Eyebeam/REFRESH Curatorial and Engagement Fellow and holds a
M.A. from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College.

SARAH WATSON is Director of Exhibitions & Chief Curator of the Hunter
College Art Galleries. Focusing primarily on time-based work including
sound, video, performance, and poetry,  Watson’s curatorial projects
center on creating experimental sites for education, collaboration,
and action. Recent exhibitions include Acts of Art and Rebuttal in
1971 and The School of Survival: Learning with Juan Downey. In
addition to overseeing the exhibitions and programming of the Hunter
College Art Galleries, Watson runs the gallery component of the
Advanced Certificate in Curatorial Studies at Hunter College. Watson
holds an M.A. in Art History from Hunter College.


On Sun, Mar 31, 2019 at 2:35 PM <dollyoko at thing.net> wrote:
>
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Thank you Sarah and Lola for inviting us to contribute to the discussion
> on Empyre this month. It's been inspiring to read first-hand what artists
> are doing, and why. And the questions that emerge for them, in the process
> of bringing together poetics and liberatory politics.
>
> In this period I find that I cannot write about art and art-making, and
> perhaps it might be that too much is happening "outside" art - that is, if
> we think that there is an inside and outside to art.
>
> On Friday 15th March there was a global Climate Strike by a reported 1.6
> million students. In Australia around 150,000 young people (and their
> supporters) took to the streets in cities, towns and villages around the
> country. About 3,000 of them were in Adelaide, my hometown, and the vibe
> and determination to do what they could - collectively - globally - to
> "refigure the future" was palpable, exhilarating.
> https://www.schoolstrike4climate.com/support-us
>
>
> Different from, but sharing a trajectory with, the 15th February 2003
> global day of protest against the looming war in Iraq. As we know, the
> latter protest did not halt the imminent war, but it was a critical
> mobilisation of all sorts of bodies and beings, and an instantiation of
> "power from below".
>
> In the context of the Empyre discussion it's worth noting that this
> massive coalescing of energies of young people comes from the seed of a
> very simple 1-person weekly protest by the then 15-year old Greta Thunberg
> (who self-describes as having been diagnosed with "Asperger syndrome, OCD
> and selective mutism").
> https://www.ted.com/talks/greta_thunberg_school_strike_for_climate_save_the_world_by_changing_the_rules/transcript?language=en
>
> But also on 15th March a devastating event happened in Aotearoa (New
> Zealand) which has affected many in the Australasian region - the
> slaughter of 50 Muslim men, women and children at prayer in 2 mosques in
> Christchurch. It was an act of terror. The perpetrator is Australian who
> live-streamed the shooting. His use of various social media platforms,
> prior to and during the murders, is the subject of an insightful analysis
> by Luke Munn, who says that from a seamless slipping between platforms
> (8chan, Youtube, Twitter, Gab, etc) emerges "a kind of algorithmic hate —
> a constellation of loosely connected digital media, experienced over
> years, that constructs an algorithmically averaged enemy."
> http://networkcultures.org/blog/2019/03/19/luke-munn-algorithmic-hate-brenton-tarrant-and-the-dark-social-web/
>
> But from this violence around Aotearoa/NZ people have come together in
> solidarity with the bereaved, embodying, literally in some instances (see
> link of students performing traditional Maori haka for their murdered
> classmates), the Prime Minister Jacinda Arden's words "They are us."
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUq8Uq_QKJo
>
> ... So, to return to where I started from, in thinking about these events
> over the past 2 weeks I have no words about art or collective art
> practices, but I sense that these events, and what flows from them -
> socially, politically, imaginatively - will seep into and inflect thinking
> and writing and making, both personal and collective projects. For there
> is no separation between art and life, it's the same thing.
>
> warmly, to all
>
> Francesca da Rimini
>
>
>
>
>
>
> > ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------Week Four:
> > COLLECTIVITY + WORLD-BUILDING
> > Guests: Emmy Catedral (US); Sofía Córdova (US); Shirin Fahimi (CA); In
> > Her Interior (Virginia Barratt (AUS) and Francesca da Rimini (AUS));
> > PJ GUBATINA POLICARPIO (US); and Addie Wagenknecht (US, AT).
> >
> > I want to thank everyone who has participated so far this month and
> > invite you all to continue these conversations over the next week as
> > we wrap up this month’s topic on “Refiguring the Future.” The work you
> > all do is important and I am sure your posts have stimulated questions
> > and thoughts from other guests as well as –empyre– readers.
> >
> > The exhibition “Refiguring the Future” closes this Sunday, March 31 and
> > this is also my and Lola's last week hosting –empyre–. As both of
> > these things move towards a conclusion, I have been thinking a lot
> > about collectivity and world-building. Collaborative practice and
> > doing with others plays a central role in “Refiguring the Future” both
> > in the work of several artists in the exhibition, but also as part of
> > the larger ethos of what it might mean to “refigure” or “reimagine”
> > our future. As we proposed in the introduction to this month’s topic,
> > “what possibilities arise when accelerating technologies are paused
> > and world-building is privileged anew?” Adding to that, what lessons can
> > we learn from previous collective and community building models? And what
> > frameworks are needed to support and sustain equitable and inclusive
> > communal platforms today?
> >
> > Our guests this week engage in collaborative practices and in a
> > liberatory, world-building politic. I am looking forward to learning
> > more about their work and approaches to collectivity. I welcome
> > Virginia Barratt (AUS) and Francesca da Rimini (AUS), who form the
> > artist collective In Her Interior; Emmy Catedral (US) and PJ GUBATINA
> > POLICARPIO (US), co-founders of P A L / Pilipinx American Library;
> > Sofía Córdova (US), half of the music duo, XUXA SANTAMARIA; Shirin
> > Fahimi (CA), founder of Taklif: تکلیف; and Addie Wagenknecht (US, AT),
> > co-founder of REFRESH and Deep Lab.
> >
> >
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
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