[-empyre-] FW: Welcome to Week 1-Interfacing COVID 19

[Renate Ferro]

Welcome to Week 1
    Interfacing COVID 19: the technologies of contagion, risk, and contamination
    Moderated by Renate Ferro, Junting Huang, Tim Murray
        
 We feature two invited guests this week: long-time -empyre- moderator Christina McPhee and Melinda Rackham our esteemed originator.  Junting Huang, Tim Murray and I will also be chiming in this week as this month's moderators to set up the month.  We have 21 guests from week 2 to 4 but we wanted to keep this week a bit more open to consider who -empyre- is and to give our 2200 plus subscribers an opportunity to post freely. 

It seems to me that the -empyre- platform might be a refreshing shift for those of us who have been on ZOOM or other virtual interfaces these past few weeks.  -empyre- soft-skinned space was originated in 2002 for exactly the same purposes of networking together a group of artists and technologists who wanted to converse together. Originally the list included a handful of Melinda's close associates and now over 2200 subscribers. All -empyre- subscribers are invited to post freely.  Narrative accounts, literary contributions, theoretical ponderings, links to interesting reading material associated with COVID, tactical strategies, health conscious tips, or survival guides to working and producing are all acceptable. Please let us know how you are doing, how your own work is adapting to the COVID environment, and where you are writing from.  

We also look forward to hearing from Christine who is in California and Melinda who is in Australia.  The biographies of our moderators and our first two guests are copied below. 

    Week 1:  April 1st- 7th            
    Christina McPhee and Melinda Rackham with Renate Ferro, Junting Huang and Tim Murray  
     

Moderator’s Biographies: 
    
    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.    
    
    Renate Ferro
    Curatorial Moderator
    -empyre- soft-skinned space

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