[-empyre-] Welcome to Margaretha Haughwout: Magic and Technology

Tue Nov 5 03:25:56 AEDT 2019

____________________________________

Welcome to November 2019  on -empyre- soft-skinned space: Magick and
Technology

Moderated by Margaretha Haughwout (US)

November 4th to 11th              Week 1: RUDERAL WITCHCRAFT:  Oliver
Kellhammer (US), Margaretha Haughwout (US), Marisa Prefer(US) with others
to join
November 11th to 18th            Week 2: CONJURING RE-ENCHANTMENT: CURSES,
HEALING, and RITUAL ACROSS NEPANTLA: Lissette-Tatiana Olivares (US/CL/CO),
Fabi Borges (BR), Lucia Monge (PE), with others to join
November 18th to 25th            Week 3: MODERNITY’S SPELL: Ricardo
Dominguez (US), Tony Discenza (US), Rhonda Holberton (US)
November 25th to 31st            Week 4: QUEER PARANORMAL: Rachel Stevens
(US) and Queer Paranormal curators and artists from the current show at
Usdan Gallery at Bennington College including Efrén Cruz Cortés, Jessica
Posner (US)

This month’s theme on -empyre- concerns magical practices and their
connections to technology. We ask, is magic a fugitive technology? Can
technology be understood as one kind of magic? Is modernity a spell that
can be broken?

To begin, I propose to think of magic in 3 ways. Within the category of
SIGNS: to think of magic, the rituals, and practices associated with it as
a way of knowing that includes alignment with the more than human.
Processes of observation, of communication across distances, across
species, with the dead, dreaming, haunting, the paranormal… entanglements…
‘animistic assemblies’ can be considered here. There is a heightened
attention to nature. Spiralling, making cats cradles, “treading the same
ground” -- this is the work we do when reading signs. Sometimes the signs
point to possible futures, and work as forecasting or PROPHECIES. In this
second category we can consider ways we know the future through
technological and magickal ways, and the ways these futures might be
impacted or manipulated through the ways we inquire about them. This leads
us to a consideration of SPELLS. Languages of science and the sacred might
be considered here. Here, we might consider everything from algorithms to
multispecies worlding.

Always, we consider the ways technology is privileged and magic is demeaned
within modernity. We must be vigilant in recognizing the impoverishment of
our language. Magic here speaks to a range of practices by peoples who have
never encountered the word ‘magic’ until colonization, and the term may or
may not capture a culture’s supernatural (understood here as ‘heightened
natural’) work. Histories of the processes of demonization of indigenous
practices in the colonies, and witches in Europe  -- through which the
engines of capitalism and colonization justify their joint projects will be
addressed. Magic is gendered, classed and raced. Magic is persistently
queer.

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On Sun, Nov 3, 2019 at 9:18 PM Renate Ferro <rferro at cornell.edu> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Dear -empyre- subscribers,
>
> For the month of November we welcome Margaretha Haughwout as moderator for
> an exciting month of discussion on, Magic and Technology. Margaretha is a
> member of our -empyre- advisory board.  She  curated the October, 2017
> topic, Radical Aesthetics of Multispecies Worlding, Eco Art and Solidarity
> in a more than human Capitalocene,
> http://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2017-October/date.html
>
> Margaretha participated in the Linz Unfinished project organized by Shulea
> Cheang and while she was there she participated in the -empyre- broadcast
> included -empyre- and four other listservs on radio.fro.
>
> Margaretha teaches in the Department of Art and Art History, Film and
> Media Studies at Colgate University in upstate New York. Her personal and
> collaborative artwork explores the intersections between ideas of
> technology and wilderness, digital networks and the urban commons,
> cybernetics and whole systems permaculture — in the context of ecological,
> technological and human survival.   Welcome once again Margaretha.  We
> welcome your nurtuance of -empyre- this month. Many thanks Margaretha for
> your nurturance of our listserv this month.
> Renate
>
> Moderator's Biography:
> Margaretha Haughwout’s (US) creative work is a kind of multispecies
> worlding — a phrase introduced by Donna Haraway, who understands it to be
> the "patterning of possible worlds," a co-becoming that occurs through
> entanglements with other species. Haughwout collaborates with humans, the
> more-than-human, and technology to enact possible worlds -- worlds that
> generate abundance, presence and relationship — and in doing so, antagonize
> proprietary regimes, colonial temporalities, and capitalist forms of labor.
> Installation, participatory event, walking tour, experimental pedagogy,
> intervention, speculative fabulation, and biological processes articulate
> stages of worlding processes. In 2019, Haughwout’s work has been featured
> at Stadwerkstatt in Linz Austria, at the Usdan Gallery at Bennington
> College, and as a part of SLSA’s Experimental Engagements exhibition.
>
>
> Renate Ferro
> Visiting Associate Professor
> Director of Undergraduate Studies
> Department of Art
> Tjaden Hall 306
> rferro at cornell.edu
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
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