[-empyre-] Week 2: Welcome Tim Murray and Ana Valdes

[Renate Ferro]

Welcome Tim Murray and Ana Valdes to our April Discussion: Between the Body, Memory, Screen and Culture.

We have spent the first week of our discussion discussing the physicality of Barbara Hammer’s film, video, performance, and installation work.  Hammer, a lesbian artist, died of cancer March 16th just a few weeks ago.  For the remainder of the month we will pay tribute to other feminist artists who passed away recently, curator and new media artist, Grace Quintanilla from Mexico City, performance and video artist, Carolee Scheemann, and filmmaker Agnes Varda from France.  Like Hammer these artists have incorporated discourse, action, and the use of technology in their work to conceptualize their ideas.  

We welcome –empyre- artists, curators, writers, historians, technologists and others to share with us narratives and recollections of how any of these artists may have influenced you.  We invite you all to post freely narratives, links to artistic work, or writings.  

We welcome curator and writer, Tim Murray, who has known Grace Quantanilla for the last twenty or so years.  He not only curated her artistic work but also invited her to collaborate on conferences and forums held here in the US , Mexico, and in South America.  Tim, I know will also be able to address the work of the other artists as well, not only on the production of their work but on the process of archiving and cataloging artistic work.  

We also welcome back Ana Valdes, a feminist, and ardent political activist.  
Ana will share her own work with us, but also comment on the influences that these artists have had on her. Looking forward to this week. 

Bios are below. Renate
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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. He is currently the Director of the Cornell Council for the arts and is curating the Cornell Biennial in fall, 2020. 
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. Ana has been a long-time participant of –empyre-soft-skinned space. 




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