[-empyre-] thanks to Week 2 guests

[Renate Ferro]

Many thanks to the guests we featured from Week 2.  I loved last week when Melinda pulled out a few quotes from each guests' posts and I thought I would do the same this week to revisit a few.  Central to our discussion was the central issues of porosity:  between locales or nations, between life and non-life, between interpretation and understanding of simulated models, between who the individual is and who the "other" is, and finally between time and absence.  

 Paul Vanouse who toward the end of the week wrote, "The fear of scent seems particularly profound, because unlike a touch, an accidental proximity can’t be erased with Purelle.  We can only imagine with the scent of another, what other chemicals/molecules may be entering our lungs. We are reminded of the interesting description viral ontology (by Cornell scientist, Gary Whittaker in the Washington Post recently) as something between the realms of Chemistry and Biology."

Elizabeth Wijaya wrote from Toronto, "the porosity of borders has led to an intensification of nationalistic thinking and action, in terms of drawing even tighter
boundaries and guarding what's within a defined boundary, whether within a
nation-state, a city, or a family unit defined by residential proximity."

Jonathan Basile wrote also about borders. "While this doesn’t speak directly to the particular political corruption and incompetence exacerbating the COVID-19 pandemic, it is not entirely divorced from an ethico-political reflection on our current crisis. It is
impossible to render oneself entirely immune to viruses without eliminating
the life in oneself. And it is not simply a metaphorical application of
this principle to say that while there are good methods of prevention (e.g.
social distancing) against bad viruses, the same logic quickly becomes its
opposite. Any intervention that tries to focus aid within our own borders,
as if nothing could cross them (for example, sanctions preventing medical
supplies from reaching Iran, or stealing PPE from other countries."

Soretlle Henirucs wrote, "I am finding that, in Singapore and perhaps all over the world, the threat of contagion is linked essentially to an "other." At the most basic level
this other is the "coronavirus" but also, more distinctly, the concern is
who is carrying it as a host."

Gloria Kim wrote "I'm part of a working group on embodied
experiences of time and absence in quarantine and self-isolation. One thing
that has surfaced in our discussions is that we all had expressed
experiencing brief moments of alarm when, while watching TV/movies; we
would see scenes of crowds/people not social distancing and watch in
amazement and shock (before reminding ourselves that "our" time is not
"that" time)."

Also thanking our other -empyre-writers  on this very late Wednesday night. 
Hope you will all stay with us for Week 3. 
Renate


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