[-empyre-] Welcome to April on -empyre- Interfacing COVID 19: the technologies of contagion, risk, and contamination

[Renate Ferro]

Welcome to April 2020 on –empyre- soft-skinned space: 
Interfacing COVID 19: the technologies of contagion, risk, and contamination
Moderated by Renate Ferro, Junting Huang, Tim Murray

All -empyre- subscribers are invited to post. Please let us know how you are doing, how your own work is adapting to the COVID environment, and where you are writing from.  

Guests: 
Week 1:  April 1st- 7th            
Christina McPhee and Melinda Rackham with Renate Ferro, Junting Huang and Tim Murray   
Week 2:  April 8th to 14th        
Jonathan Basile, Sorelle Henricus, Gloria Kim, Cengiz Salman,Paul Vanouse,Elizabeth Wijiaya 
Week 3: April 15th to 21st  
Stewart Ayash, Maurice Benayoun, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Arthur Kroker, Premesh Lalu,Sooyon Lee, Gianluca Pulsoni, Dingquan Xie
Week 4: March 22nd to 30th    
Ricardo Dominguez, Annie J. McClanahan, Rahul Mukerjee, Davide Pangea, Bhaskar Sarkar, Patricia Zimmermann
______________________________________________________________

Welcome to the April discussion on –empyre-. 
Over the past several years, we have theorized and conceptualized issues that concern the fragility of life.
 
In November of 2012, we featured a discussion on Risk moderated by Tim Murray and Renate Ferro:  
http://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2012-November/005916.html

In November of 2017, Renate moderated a discussion on Contamination. 
 http://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2017-November/009970.html

And finally, in November of 2018, we featured a discussion around Tim’s article and 2018 Cornell Biennial: “Duration: Passage, Persistence, Survival”: 
http://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2018-November/010479.html

Now, we too suddenly find ourselves in the midst of a global pandemic the effects of which are being felt personally by all of us. First and foremost, we want to send virtual good wishes to you and all of your families.  Some of you have passed through the wave of the virus in Asia, while many of you are now in the middle of social isolation, personal sickness, and potential tragedy.  We want all of you to know that we are thinking of you daily as we dedicate this month to you as part of our networked community.

The continually evolving challenges of COVID-19 test our personal and extended relationships, biological and medical environments, language and communication networks, government and educational infrastructures, artistic communities and platforms, and the foundation of our economic and financial lives.   In the midst of these times, we are relying on technology to connect gaps in our worlds at the same time we find ourselves relying on the public health system’s embrace of draconian digital tracking and surveillance we might otherwise resist.  This month on -empyre- we pause to feature our subscribers and many guests around the world who will be sharing personal narratives, practical experiences, and tactical strategies in the interface of COVID-19.  

Many of our guests have spent years creating art and writing essay around the challenges of virility, risk, contamination, and biosystems.  Others are finding themselves needing to suspend their art projects and critical pursuits in other areas to dwell on the suddenness, danger, loss, and peril wrought globally by COVID-19.  Our guests also find themselves at differing moments of the COVID “curve” as they hail from global communities facing the COVID risk from varying peaks and valleys.  While our guests will be leading us in discussion, we hope to speak back to COVID by invigorating the call and response of our -empyre- community as we join together to share our thoughts, emotions, and aspirations.

Please feel free to post generously and often this month. Please stay in touch and stay safe.  We will be introducing new sets of guests every week, but will dedicate the first week of the month to open thoughts and comments.  We cherish our -empyre- community and look forward to profiting from its wisdom and solace as we think and create together to confront the difficult duration of this threatening virus.


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Moderator’s Biography: 

Renate Ferro’s creative work resides within the areas of emerging technology, new media and culture. Her artistic work has been featured at the Nanyang Technological University (Singapore), The Freud Museum (London), The Dorksy Gallery (NY), The Hemispheric Institute and FOMMA (Mexico), and The Janus Pannonius Muzeum (Hungary). Ferro is a Visiting Associate Professor of Art at Cornell University.  She has been on the moderating team of -empyre- soft-skinned space since 2007 and is currently the curatorial moderator. 

Junting Huang is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at Cornell University. His research interests include Chinese and Taiwanese literature, cinema, and media culture, Chinese diasporic culture in the Caribbean. His dissertation project, “The Noise Decade: Intermedial Impulse in Chinese Sound Recording,” examines an artistic encounter across the Taiwan Strait between the 1990s and 2000s, where an aesthetic and political discourse on “noise” intersected with the convergence of media. At Cornell, he is also the Assistant Curator at the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art.

Tim Murray is a curator of new media and contemporary art and a theorist of visual studies and digital culture.  He is Director of the Cornell Council for the Arts, Curator of the Cornell Biennial and the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, and Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Cornell University. A member of the -empyre- moderating team since 2007, his exhibitions include the 2018 Cornell Biennial, “Signal to Code: 50 Years of Media Art in the Goldsen Archive” (2016), CTHEORY MULTIMEDIA with Arthur and Marilouise Kroker (2000-03), and “Contact Zones: The Art of CD-Rom” (1999-2002).  His books include Medium Philosophicum: Thinking Art Electronically (forthcoming in Spanish, 2020) and Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds (2008).  
Guest’s Biographies
Week 1

Christina McPhee’s images move from within a matrix of abstraction, shadowing figures and contingent effects. Her work emulates potential forms of life, in various systems and territories, and in real and imagined ecologies. Her dynamic, performative, physical engagement with drawing, in both her analogue and digital works, is a seduction into surface-skidding calligraphies and mark-making. The tactics of living are in subterfuge, like the dazzle ships of camouflage in war. Lines throw down rope-like bridges, cat’s-cradling figures, or a search for grounding and commons. Cached and clustered, fragments take exception to systems. Color sparks disruptions of scale that reveal allusions to biochemical contraventions, migration, grammars, and marine stress. Her work takes on violence, tragi-comic exuberance, and vitality 

Melinda Rackham is an artist, curator and author. Active for over 20 years in the local, national and international media and contemporary arts arena, Melinda has extensive knowledge of art forms emerging in new and traditional technologies such as e-literature; design and making; networked, distributed, augmented and virtual arts.
As a pioneering Australian Internet artist intertwining narratives of still and moving image, responsive code, sound and hypertext, Rackham exhibited her award-winning net art sites and virtual worlds at major global festivals and biennales [1995- ]. She established-empyre- one of the world’s leading networked media arts and critical theory forums [2002- ], as part of her PhD in Virtual Reality. Currently Professor Rackham holds an Adjunct Research position in the School of Art, Architecture and Design, University of South Australia. 


Week 2

Jonathan Basile is a Ph.D. Candidate in Emory University’s Comparative Literature program and the creator of an online universal library, libraryofbabel.info. His first book, Tar for Mortar: “The Library of Babel” and the Dream of Totality, has been published by punctum books and translated into Portuguese. His academic writing on biodeconstruction and on irony has been published in the Oxford Literary Review, Critical Inquiry, Derrida Today, Variaciones Borges, Environmental Philosophy, Postmodern Culture, CR: The New Centennial Review and is forthcoming in Angelaki. His para-academic writing has been published in The Paris Review Daily, Public Books, Berfrois, Guernica, and minor literature[s]. This work can be accessed at jonathanbasile.info.

Sorelle Henricus works in the areas of critical theory, modern and contemporary literature and visual arts, and aesthetics and politics especially as it pertains to science and technology in culture. Her doctoral work traced the significance of the parallels between deconstruction and molecular biology, particularly converging around the concept of the gene as being constructed as primarily an artefact of data. 

Gloria Kim is Assistant Professor of Media and Culture at the University of California-Riverside. She works in the areas of the environmental humanites, science and technology studies, and media and visual culture. She is currently writing a book manuscript titled "The Microbial Resolve: Vision, Mediation, and Security," in which she  explores modes of mediation, forms of kinship, means of capital, and senses of life and living surfacing amid efforts to manage emerging viruses. In a second project, Gloria examines discourses of the microbiome bridging insight from critical data studies, social theory, affect, security studies, material culture, and the anthropocene. 

Cengiz Salman (he/him) is a PhD candidate in the Department of American Culture (Digital Studies) at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His dissertation research broadly focuses on the relationship between digital media, algorithms, unemployment, and racial capitalism. He holds a
Master of Arts degree in Social Science from the University of Chicago (2013), and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Anthropology with a specialization in Muslim Studies from Michigan State University (2011). Salman is a recipient of a Fulbright IIE Award, which he used to conduct research on urban transformation projects in Turkey from 2011-2012.

Paul Vanouse is an artist and professor of Art at the University at Buffalo, NY, where he is the founding director of the Coalesce Center for Biological Art. Interdisciplinarity and impassioned amateurism guide his (bio-media) art practice, which uses molecular biology techniques to challenge “genome hype” and to explore critical issues surrounding contemporary biotechnologies. Vanouse’s projects have been funded by Rockefeller Foundation, Creative Capital Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Sun Microsystems, and the National Science Foundation. His bio-media and interactive cinema projects have been exhibited in over 25 countries and widely across the US. His scent-based bioartwork, Labor, was awarded a Golden Nica at Prix Ars Electronica, 2019. He has an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University.


Elizabeth Wijaya is Assistant Professor of East Asian Cinema in the Department of Visual Studies and Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. She is co-founder of the Singapore-based film production company, E&W Films. She is working on her book manuscript on the visible and invisible worlds of trans-Chinese cinema.

Week 3

Stewart Auyash is Chair and Associate Professor in the Department of Health Promotion and Physical Education at Ithaca College. He studies and teaches public health policy, public health communication, and media representations of public health.  He has written and spoken about his observations and experiences living in Singapore during the SARS epidemic.  In his spare time while teaching online during the pandemic, he is revisiting the numerous books and articles that forewarned about a catastrophic global public health event and why so few paid attention. 

Maurice Benayoun-Artist, theorist and curator, based in Paris and Hong Kong, Maurice Benayoun (MoBen, 莫奔) is a pioneering and prominent figure in the field of New Media Art. MoBen’s work freely explores media boundaries; from virtual reality to large-scale public art installations, on a socio-political perspective. Maurice Benayoun’s work has been widely awarded (Golden Nica Ars Electronica 1998 and more than 25 international awards) and exhibited in major international museums (2 solo shows at Centre Pompidou Paris), biennials and festivals in 26 different countries. Some of MoBen’s major artworks include The Tunnel under the Atlantic (VR, 1995), World Skin a Photo Safari in the Land of War (VR, 1997), the Mechanics of Emotions (2005-2014), and Cosmopolis (VR, 2005). Elaborating on the concept of Critical Fusion applied to art in physical or virtual public space, Maurice Benayoun initiated the Open Sky Project on the ICC Tower Hong Kong media façade. 

With the Brain Factory and Value of Values, in the framework of Mindspaces collaborative research from Horizon2020, Starts Lighthouse EU program, he is now focusing on the morphogenesis of thought, between neuro-design and crypto currency, values and money.

With a PhD in Art and Art Sciences, MoBen taught from 1984 new media art practice and theory at Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne and Paris 8 University. He was Professor and artist in residence at the French National School of Fine Arts (ENSBA). Since 2012, Maurice Benayoun is full Professor at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong.

Bishnupriya Ghosh teaches global media studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. After the monographs, When Borne Across (2004) and Global Icons (2011), which theorize cultures of globalization, she has turned to media and risk in the co-edited The Routledge Companion to Media and Risk (Routledge 2020) and The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media (work in progress).

Arthur Kroker is Canada Research Chair in Technology, Culture and Theory, Professor of Political Science, and the Director of the Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture at the University of Victoria. From his research for a new book project, “I Stepped into the Future and it Wasn’t There,” to his ongoing studies of technology and society, Arthur Kroker writes the digital future. Here, some of the key psychic symptomologies and political consequences of the present pandemic have been rehearsed in his collaborative work, “Panic Encyclopedia.” The fears and anxieties surrounding Covid-19 have been anticipated, in bodily detail and in social definition, in his book, “Body Invaders” written in collaboration with Marilouise Kroker. And what better describes the panic hysteria of the Trump administration in the face of uncontrolled viral contagion and a society dissolving under the weight of  evidence-based risk of infection than “The Hysterical Male,” another of his collaborative writing projects. 

Could the present pandemic be an transition point, quickly transiting us to a new future based on the collapse of the social; the devolution of politics into continuing states of emergency; the shedding of labor in favor of the triumph of virtual capitalism;  and the resurgence of the new ethical values of social distancing, tracking, monitoring and self-isolation? Like one of those violent spring winds that sweep away the lingering debris of the winter past, Covid-19 may also have its political consequences, namely shaking up the old structure of society to reveal what lays just beneath—the very real politics of viral contagion.

Premesh Lalu is former director of the Centre for Humanities Research, and Principle Investigator of the DST-NRF Flagship on Critical Thought in African Humanities, at the University of the Western Cape (http://www.chrflagship.uwc.ac.za/).
Lalu has published widely in academic journals on historical discourse and the Humanities in Africa and is a regular contributor of public opinion pieces on the arts and humanities. His articles have appeared in History and Theory, Journal of Southern African Studies, Critical Times, Kronos: Southern African Histories, Economic and Political Weekly and the South African Historical Journal. His book, The Deaths of Hintsa: Post-apartheid South Africa and the Shape of Recurring Pasts (2009) was included in the Alan Paton longlist in 2010. In it, Lalu argues for a postcolonial critique of apartheid that will foster a concept of post-apartheid freedom. He is also co-editor of Remains of the Social: Desiring the Post-apartheid (Wits University Press, 2017). His short film, Looking for Ned, was screened at the Encounters Documentary film festival in Cape Town in 2018.  Currently, he working on a monograph titled The Techne of Trickery: Race and its Uncanny Returns and a feature-length documentary titled The Long Silence that deals with cinematic memory of apartheid.
Sooyon Lee is a Ph.D. Student in the Dep. Of the History of Art and Visual Studies, Cornell University and Associate Media Curator, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea. Her research focuses on visual languages implemented by digital/electronic media in East Asian contemporary art engaged with socio-political changes in 1990s and 2000s. Interested in the conditions of the society that artists reside in and how introduction of new media facilitates the generation of new visual languages in the globalized context. Dissertation topic explores Korean contemporary art scene from late 1990s to early 2000s pursuing the development of three key concepts in new media art specifically in response to Korean modern (art) history; cyberspace and minjung misul, digital materiality and Dansaekhwa movement, and the condition of postmodern represented in new media art.         

She received BA in Linguistics and MA in art history from Seoul National University, Korea. From 2008 to 2015, as a media curator at National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea(MMCA), organized numeral media exhibitions including; Out of the Silent Planet(2010) first media collection show in MMCA, Public Project Cheonggye(2011), Art of Communication: Anri Sala, Yang Ah Ham, Philippe Parreno, Jorge Pardo(2011), performance exhibition with Hayward Gallery in London Move(2012) and 3-year Germany-Korea Museum Project Korea-NRW International Art and Artists Exchange Program (2013).

Dingquan Xie is a lecturer of Chinese contemporary art in the Department of Chinese Painting at Jiangxi Normal University. He is also a contemporary artist in China. He is interested in using the transformations of traditional Chinese images to reflect on various problems and phenomena in contemporary Chinese society. His recent large-scale work, The Other Shore (2015) uses the back images of Chinese Taoist gods to reflect on the current belief system in China. He can be reached at DingquanXie at 163.com.

Week 4

Ricardo Dominguez was a founding member of Critical Art Ensemble in the 1980’s, a co-founder of The Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT), a group who developed virtual sit-in technologies in solidarity with the Zapatistas communities in Chiapas, Mexico, in 1998. He also established in 2007 the Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab project the Transborder Immigrant Tool (a GPS cell phone safety net tool for navigating the Mexico/US border:http://tbt.tome.press/) with Brett Stalbaum, micha cardenas, Amy Sara Carroll, and Elle Mehrmand. The project was the winner of “Transnational Communities Award” (2008), an award funded by Cultural Contact, Endowment for Culture Mexico–US and handed out by the US Embassy in Mexico. It also was funded by CALIT2 and the UCSD Center for the Humanities. The project was also under investigation by the US Congress in 2009-2010 and was reviewed by Glenn Beck in 2010 as a gesture that potentially “dissolved” the U.S. border with its poetry. Dominguez is Associate Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego, Society for the Humanities Fellow (Cornell University, 2017 -18), a Rockefeller Arts & Humanities Fellow, (Bellagio, Italy, 2018), a Hellman Fellow, and a Principal Investigator at CALIT2/QI, UCSD. He also is co-founder of *particle group*, with artists Diane Ludin, Nina Waisman, Amy Sara Carroll, whose art project about nano-toxicology entitled *Particles of Interest: Tales of the Matter Market* has been presented at the House of World Cultures, Berlin (2007), the San Diego Museum of Art (2008), Oi Futuro, Brazil (2008), CAL NanoSystems Institute, UCLA (2009), Medialab-Prado, Madrid (2009), E-Poetry Festival, Barcelona, Spain (2009), Nanosférica, NYU (2010), SOMA, Mexico City, Mexico (2012) and a number of other national and international venues in recent years.

Annie McClanahan is an Associate Professor of English at University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and 21st Century Culture (Stanford UP), which was awarded the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Best Book of 2016 Prize.  Dead Pledges explores the ways that U.S. culture—from novels and poems to photojournalism and horror movies—responded to the collapse of the financialized consumer credit economy in 2008. She’s also working on two new projects. The first is about cultural representations of contemporary work, especially tipwork, gigwork, and automatable professional-managerial work. The second is a cultural history of the rise of microeconomics and methodological individualism, taking the measure of microeconomics’ influence on critical and political theory across the long-20th century.
 She has published widely, including in Los Angeles Review of Books, COMMUNE, symploke, Representations, The Journal of Cultural Economy, and Theory & Event.

Rahul Mukherjee is Assistant Professor of Television and New Media Studies at University of Pennsylvania. Drawing on the conceptual lenses of cultural studies, media theory, and science studies, he has written on database management systems, advertising cultures of mobile telephony, and chronic toxicities related to radiation exposure and chemical disasters. His book "Radiant Infrastructures: Media, Environment, and Cultures of Uncertainty" (Duke, 2020) involves studying mediations of debates/controversies related to radiation emitting technologies such as cell antennas and nuclear reactors. His second book project examines aspirational mobilities unleashed by mobile media technologies. 

Davide Panagia is Professor of Political Science at UCLA. He is a political theorist with multidisciplinary interests across the humanities and social sciences including contemporary political theory and the history of political thought, aesthetics, critical algorithm studies, and the philosophy of media. His most recent book publications include Rancière’s Sentiments (Duke, 2018), Ten Theses for an Aesthetics of Politics (Minnesota,  2016) and these publications related to his most recent project #datapolitik, which is a study of the modalities of power in the age of the algorithm: a Los Angeles Review of Books Interview, and “The Algorithm Dispositif (Notes Towards an Investigation)”.

Gianluca Pulsoni is a Ph.D. student in Romance Studies and a regular contributing writer at Il manifesto (www.ilmanifesto.it). He has also written for other journals. His primary research field is the experimental scene in Italian cinema over the years, in particular from the 60s to the current trends in animation.

Bhaskar Sarkar Chair and Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies, UC Santa Barbara, is the author of Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition (Duke University Press, 2009). He has published a wide range of articles in edited collections like World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives (Routledge, 2008), International Communication (Sage Benchmarks in Communication, 2012), and Figurations in Indian Film (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), as well  as in journals such as Rethinking History, positions: asia-critique, Cultural Dynamics, and Transnational Cinemas. He is also co-editor of Documentary Testimonies: Global Archives of Suffering(Routledge, 2009), Asian Video Cultures: In the Penumbra of the Global  (Duke University Press, 2017)), The Routledge Companion to Media And Risk (Routledge, 2020), and two journal special issues, “The Subaltern and the Popular,” Journal of Postcolonial Studies (2005) and “Indian Documentary Studies,” BioScope (2012). He is currently completing a monograph, Cosmoplastics: Bollywood’s Global Gesture, and working on another,  Pirate Humanites.

Patricia R. Zimmermann is Professor of Screen Studies at Ithaca College and codirector of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival. She is author of Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film; States of Emergency: Documentaries, Wars, Democracies; Thinking Through Digital Media: Transnational Environments and Locative Places (with Dale Hudson); Open Spaces: Openings, Closings, and Thresholds of International Public Media;  The Flaherty: Decades in the Cause of Independent Cinema (with Scott MacDonald);Open Space New Media Documentary: A Toolkit for Theory and Practice (with Helen De Michiel), and Documentary Across Platforms: Reverse Engineering Media, Place, and Politics. She is co-editor (with Karen Ishizuka) of Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories. A media historian and theorist, her research and writing focus on documentary, new media, film/media/new media history, amateur film and emerging amateur technologies, media and environment, and histories of the international public media arts.











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