[-empyre-] Welcome to Week 4 on -em; yre- Interfacing COVID 19: the technologies of contagion, risk, and contamination

[Renate Ferro]

Welcome to Week 4 on -empyre- soft-skinned space.  This week we welcome our last grouping of guests, Ricardo Dominguez, Kathy High, Annie J. McClanahan, Rahul Mukerjee, Davide Pangea, Bhaskar Sarkar, Patricia Zimmermann, and Gianluca Pulsoni.   Junting, Tim and I welcome each of you to share personal narratives and research, your practical experiences, and tactical strategies in the interface of COVID-19.  

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.

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/biotech/bio-science, and animal/interspecies collaborations that have been exhibited across North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. High is Professor of Video and New Media in the Department of Arts and has a laboratory in the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. She is a supporter of community DIY science and ecological art practices. She is project coordinator for urban environmental center, NATURE Lab, with The Sanctuary for Independent Media. 

Among many honors, she is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Her art works have been shown at documenta 13 (Germany), Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Lincoln Center and Exit Art (NYC), UCLA (Los Angeles), Science Gallery, (Dublin), NGBK, (Berlin), Fesitval Transitio_MX (Mexico), MASS MoCA (North Adams), Para-site Gallery (Hong Kong), and Esther Klein Gallery, Science Center (Philadelphia). She has had residencies with SymbioticA (2009-10), Finnish Society of Bioart (2013), Coalesce UBuffalo (2016-17), Djerassi Scientific Delirium Madness (2019), DePaolo Lab, UW, Seattle (ongoing).  

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