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

[Ezra Benus]

Hi all,
It’s been incredible receiving the messages this month on the great artists who have died, but who have carved out cultural space for emerging queer/sick/disabled artists like myself. Their exploration of the body, sexuality, pain, care, pleasure, and sickness are deep references for artists in my contemporary disability/queer arts communities. 

In that spirit I’d like to share and invite folks to two shows I have work in among other queer/sick/disabled artists I have work in a show at NYU Gallatin that is up through tomorrow, and tonight is the closing reception from 6-8pm. https://wp.nyu.edu/gallatingalleries/upcoming-shows/crip-imponderabilia/

And I have work in a show opening next week in Long Island city at an art space called Flux Factory http://www.fluxfactory.org/event/talk-back/ from May 9- through June 2. If you might be able to make it to either/both I’d love to hear your thoughts, you’re all giving me so much to reflect on empyre thinkers! Hope all is well, and please feel free to connect further.

Best,
Ezra 
http://www.ezrabenus.com/

Sent from my iPhone

> On Mar 31, 2019, at 10:46 PM, Sarah Watson <sarahawatson at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> 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
>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
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