[-empyre-] Welcome to the April topic: Between the Body, Memory, Screen and Culture-

[Renate Ferro]

Welcome to April 2019  on –empyre- soft-skinned space
Between the Body, Memory, Screen and Culture
In memory of Grace Quintanilla (MX) 1968 to 2019
                         Barbara Hammer (US) 1939 to 2019
                         Carolee Schneemann (US) 1930 to 2019
                         Agnes Varda (FR) 1928 to 2019
Moderated by Renate Ferro (US) 
April 1st to 7th Week 1: Renate Ferro (US), Josasia Raczynska
April 8th to 14th Week 2: Tim Murray(US), Ana Valdes (UR)
April 15th to 21st Week 3: Constanza Salazar, Rachel Fein-Smolinski Lynne Sachs (US)
April 22nd to 31st Week 4: Emily V Duke, Jessica Posner, Patrick Lichty (US, UAE)

Welcome to the April discussion on –empyre–soft-skinned space. Within the timespan of a few weeks the art world has lost four artists whose work is located within the discourses of the physical body, memory, and screen. We pay homage to video and performance artists Grace Quintanilla (Mexico), Barbara Hammer (US), Carolee Schneemann (US), and Agnes Varda (FR).  These artists and many with them have located their discourse within feminist presence, persistence, struggle and cultural resonance. Through discourse, action, and the use of technology these artists taught us about life and living. We invite the subscribers of –empyre– to join us by sharing biographical information and links in celebration of the work of these artists. 

Additionally. we invite our subscribers, artists, writers, art historians and others, whose own work broadly resonates with the themes these women dedicated their lives to.  We celebrate issues revolving around the body, memory, and culture through screen, moving image, virtual reality and more. We welcome our guests and ALL of our subscribers to actively participate and post this month.  LET’S GET GOING. 

TO MAKE A POST TO THE SUBSCRIPTION LIST: 
empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au

 TO ACCESS ARCHIVE
http://lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/  

Renate Ferro
Curator, Managing Moderator –empyre-

Biographies: 
Moderator: 
Renate Ferro (US) is a conceptual media artist who toggles between the creative skins of old and new technologies. Her work has been featured at the Hunter College Gallery (NYC), The Freud Museum (London), The Dorksy Gallery (NYC), The Hemispheric Institute and FOMMA (Mexico), The Janus Pannonius Muzeum (Hungary), and The Free University Berlin (Germany). Her video work has been screened at Peking University (Beijing), Johnson Art Museum (Ithaca, NY), and Nanyang Technological University (Singapore).  She has taught at Cornell University since 2004 and the managing moderator and curator of –empyre-soft-skinned space.  She has been on the moderating board of –empyre- since 2007.  

Week 1 
Renate Ferro 

Joanna Raczynska: I’m a writer, curator, and filmmaker based in Baltimore, MD, who – since 2009 – has organized screenings and artist presentations for the film department at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. Guests have included Barbara Hammer, Babette Mangolte, Kevin Jerome Everson, Jem Cohen, Peter Hutton, and Jennifer Reeves, to name a few. I’ve juried competitions for the Animator International Animated Film Festival, Poznan, Poland; Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival, England; International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Germany; Ann Arbor Film Festival, MI; Images Festival, Toronto, Canada; and Cleveland International Film Festival, OH. As a panelist for a variety of funding agencies including the New York State Council on the Arts, Individual Artists Program, and the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance, Rubys Artist Projects Grants, I’ve helped to support moving image work with awards given directly to independent filmmakers. My experience in arts administration spans work with several non-profit organizations including Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Buffalo, NY (where I was media arts director); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; and the Baltimore Museum of Art, among others. I earned my master’s degree with distinction in documentary by practice, Royal Holloway College, University of London (2001). Several of my shorts have screened at various international sites, including the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, Poland; ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany; Sheffield Doc/Fest and LUX, London, UK; and Squeaky Wheel, Buffalo, NY. 

Week 2
Timothy Murray (US) is Professor of Comparative Literature and English and Curator of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art in the Cornell Library. A curator of new media and contemporary art, and theorist of visual studies and digital culture, he has been forging international intersections in exhibition and print between the arts, humanities, and technology for over twenty-five years.
In addition to programming innovative series in video and cinema, he has been at the curatorial forefront of international exhibitions in digital and conceptual art. He staged the largest international exhibition of digital art created for CD-Rom, “Contact Zones: The Art of CD-Rom” (https://contactzones.cit.cornell.edu), which toured from 1999-2004 in the US, Canada, Mexico, France, with offshoots in Macau and Johannesburg. With Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, he curated and designed the conceptual internet art journal, “CTHEORY Multimedia” (http://ctheorymultimedia.cornell.edu), and, with Teo Spiller, he staged the first off-line internet art exhibition at INFOS 2000 in Slovenia. Most recently, he collaborated with Sarah Watson and Sherry Miller Hocking on “The Experimental Television Center: A History, ETC” at Hunter College Galleries in New York City and he curated “Signal to Code: 50 Years of Media Art in the Goldsen Archive” (http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/signaltocode/) in the Cornell Library and the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art. He founded the Rose Goldsen Archive in 2002, which since has grown into a leading international repository of electronic and digital art.  He serves as moderator of the -empyre- new media listserv since 2007. 

Ana Valdes UR) is a writer, art curator and social anthropologist born in Uruguay. She was a political prisoner for several years. She lived in Sweden where she became engaged in the Palestinian struggle for an independent state. Now she is working with a former inmate of Guantanamo writing a book and making a film. She is currently working on research with several Swedish and Uruguayan institutions on the issues of exile and the diaspora. This research will result in an upcoming exhibition and book.

Week 3
Constanza Salazar's research focuses on expanding the traditional boundaries of the discipline of art history by incorporating new interdisciplinary theoretical paradigms that explore the intimate relationship between new media art, philosophy and critical theory. 
Her current work includes renegotiating the concepts of identity, embodiment, affect, and performance to uncover new ways of conceptualizing "the body" and "otherness" in relation to space, and borders, via technology, especially tactical media, towards the possibility of resistance.
Salazar completed her schooling in Canada. She holds a BA in Fine Arts from the University of Waterloo, and completed her M.A. in Art History at the University of Guelph. Salazar has presented papers internationally which examine the theories of new materialism, new ontology, and posthumanism within contemporary art and critical theory.
Rachel Fein-Smolinski is an artist based in Syracuse, NY who works in photography, video, and installation. She was raised in Buffalo, NY and holds a B.F.A. in Studio Art from the San Francisco Art Institute and an M.F.A. in Art Photography from Syracuse University where she is currently a part-time faculty member. Her work uses sci-fi and adopts the authoritative aesthetics of biology and medicine to deal with courage and pain through the saving graces of neurosisand intellectualism. Fein-Smolinski has exhibited internationally and is the recipient of numerous awards, residencies, and publications, including the 2019 Visual Studies Workshop residency, 2018 Wynn Newhouse Award, the Silver Eye Center for Photography’s Fellowship 19 International Award Honorable Mention, the 2018 John Chervinsky Memorial Fellowship, the 2016 Constance Saltonstall Fellowship in Ithaca, New York and the Berlin Fall Semester Residency at Haubrok Foundation. She has been published in Oranbeg Press, and Photo Emphasis. Her most recent video Referred Pain was shown in the Video in America exhibition at The Everson Museum in Syracuse, NY, and will be shown in a forthcoming exhibition at SPACES in Cleveland, OH. She has shown at the Griffin Museum of Photography, and has forthcoming exhibitions at the Louise and Bernard Palitz Gallery, SUNY Upstate Medical University Health Sciences Library, and the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art. Fein-Smolinski is currently the Digital Services Coordinator at Light Work Community Darkrooms.

Lynne Sachs makes films, installations, performances and web projects that explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences by weaving together poetry, collage, painting, politics and layered sound design. Strongly committed to a dialogue between cinematic theory and practice, she searches for a rigorous play between image and sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in her work with every new project.  Lynne discovered her love of filmmaking while living in San Francisco where she worked closely with artists Bruce Conner, Ernie Gehr, Gunvor Nelson, Barbara Hammer, Craig Baldwin and Trin T. Min-ha.
 
Lynne’s recent work embraces a hybrid form combining the non-fiction, experimental and fiction modes. In the words of NYC artist Kelly Spivey, “Lynne allows her real film ‘characters’ to explore storytelling from various subjectivities, various selves and other-selves, opening up, perhaps ironically, a more authentic portrayal of being alive during a specific time, in a specific situation or place. We learn that to burrow down into our ability to imagine another’s pain or joy, and then to perform these as part of our own exploration for the camera, yields a deeper intimacy than if we’d simply ‘told the truth.’ Lynne Sachs’s work can best be epitomized by her interests in intimacy, collaboration and space.”  Both Your Day is My Night (2013) and The Washing Society (2018) are hybrid films that evolved from two-year New York City performance tours.
 
Sachs has made over 25 films which have screened at the New York Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival and Toronto’s Images Festival among others. They have also been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, Walker Art Center, Wexner Center for the Arts and other venues nationally and internationally. The Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, Festival International Nuevo Cine in Havana and the China Women’s Film Festival have all presented retrospectives of Sachs’ films. Lynne received a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts.  She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband filmmaker Mark Street. Together, they have two daughters, Maya Street-Sachs and Noa Street-Sachs. In 2018, Lynne was a visiting lecturer in the Visual Arts program at Princeton University.
www.lynnesachs.com

Week 4 
Patrick Lichty (US, USE) is a media “reality” artist, curator, and theorist of over two decades who explores how media and mediation affect our perception of reality. He is best known for his work with the virtual reality performance art group Second Front, and the animator of the activist group, The Yes Men. He is a CalArts/Herb Alpert Fellow and Whitney Biennial exhibitor as part of the collective RTMark. He has presented and exhibited internationally at numerous biennials and triennials (Yokohama, Venice, Performa, Maribor, Turin, Sundance), and conferences (ISEA, SIGGRAPH, Popular Culture Association, SLSA, SxSW)

Jessica Posner is a feminist multimedia and performance based artist and writer who practices resilience and radical vulnerability as means for healing the self, body, spirit, and each other. She currently lives and works in central New York State where she teaches video and studio art as a contingent academic laborer. She spent 7 years making art with and about butter; and is now making art about and through sisterhood, popular culture, and sharks. She originated the “FEELINGS: A Feminist Art Video and Film Festival” in 2018. Examples of her work can be viewed at jessicaposner.com and vimeo.com/jessicaposner.

Emily Duke

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