[-empyre-] On Francis Danby's Opening of the Sixth Seal

[Timothy Conway Murray]

Hi Premesh and Johannes,

So great to see you both in dialogue regarding this broad challenge of what Bishnu so aptly terms "epidemic mediation" and what Soo Yon queries as "finding the invisible."    One of the fascinating results so far of this month's deep and very wide-ranging discussion is its global resonance (here referenced from South Africa, Europe, South Korea, the US, and India) and how strongly theoretical concepts, which might initially have been formulated rather universally, here empower precise discussions of the virally fractious glocal -- indeed, isn't this the force of -empyre- at its best.   

It was in this context that I was fascinated to see Premesh formulating how  "race became a matter of a circular causality in the age of cybernetics" and how he does so in view of the enigmatic concept of "digital baroque," which Premesh and I have been referencing backchannel, and which Johannes brings to the fore as a concept important to my book, "Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds" (Minnesota, 2008).  In working on this project, I was fascinated by how new media art so frequently projection back into the epistemes of the early modern past to contribute to our understandings of contemporary ontological projection and cultural property in relation to the functions and properties of the interactive apparatus -- an apparatus whose applications and guerrilla practice have been as viral as circularly causal.  One framework articulated by Walter Benjamin in his writing on the baroque was particularly important to my sense of the 'digital baroque': his prescient understanding of the process of storing and schemata of the emergent early modern library and literature which "pile up fragments ceaselessly without any strict idea of a goal, and .. to take the repetition of stereotypes for a process of intensification" and, thereby, how "chronological movement is grasped and analyzed in a spatial image."  It is within this context of a vibrant intensification of condensations that we might visualize how, in Premesh's words,: "the racial remains of slavery appear to be distributed across the spiral of biopolitics and industrial capitalism, while its uncertain energies were folded into mechanisms of communication and control."  

Such uncertain energies lingering in networked communications have been rewired by many activist artists important to my book, such as Keith Piper, Reginald Woolery, Lynn Hershman Leeson, and Grace Quintanilla, for whom the legacies race, sexual, and cultural identity weigh heavily and lend themselves to artistic rewiring in the emergent digital environment of the 1990s and early 2000s.  I hear in their works strong echoes of how Premesh approaches Danby’s painting as providing "a space of convergence for thinking such a new history: the abolition of slavery, the expansion of technological resources, the work of art in an industrial age, changes in the circulation of commodities and the accompanying technical reproducibility of artwork, the distribution of art through exhibition and distribution of offprints, and stitching of the image of the slave into a canvas from which it had been excised. Not to mention a bolt of electricity."

What I also try to articulate in "Digital Baroque" is how such bolts of artistic electricity diverge from the calming and subjugating aesthetic norms of dialectical universalism that sustained modernism and the cultural apparati of colonialism, technological expansion, and theoretical transcendence. What I call "digital incompossibility" in the book is particularly important in this regard and bears a strong relation to how this month's guests have been articulating the diversification of viral impact and response in relation to same common bio-technological episteme: COVID 19. My sense of this notion derived from Gilles Deleuze's articulation of the bifurcating fabulations of seriality, "incompossible presents," through which each series -- each viral strain and carriage -- tells completely different stories that unfold simultaneously.  This vibrant process of incompossible intensification offers one avenue, as I understand it, of response to Premesh's important question of how  "the work of art both invites us to think ahead and live in the shadow of disappointment of communication thus conceived."  

While my conceptualizations tend of framed by philosophy and 'high theory' (which I appreciate are less welcoming in some communities than in others), this month's conversation also foregrounds more specifically artistic frames.  In thinking about Premesh's prompt that we ponder the valence of art, I cannot help but also echo Ricardo Dominguez's sense of the performative matrix of such "digital incompossiblity," which he laments have been often set aside in readings of the viral media  art of his Electronic Disturbance Theater.  In an interview with Leila Nadir, Ricardo laments that "often the terms targeted are 'electronic' and 'disturbance,' not 'theater.' So when you ask what can art do that activism cannot do," he continues, "it is a different distribution of response that the aesthetic affords via our investigations of code switching as an art practice." Or as Ricardo so aptly puts it otherwise, "the question of aesthetics, at least for us, creates a disturbance in the 'Law' to the degree that it cannot easily contain the 'break' and it is forced to enter into another conversation — a conversation that power-as-enforcement may not want to have."  Ricardo prompts me to think about his code-switching as we consider Premesh's query of the uncertain energies that become folded into mechanisms of communication and control.

It has been so invigorating in this time of intense isolation to be enlivened by the intensification of all of your postings this month.  Hope these notions and thoughts are helpful as we move into the final week of our discussion of "Interfacing COVID-19."

All my best, as it (no kidding) is now snowing in Ithaca, New York.

Tim 

Timothy Murray
Director, Cornell Council for the Arts and Curator, Cornell Biennial
http://cca.cornell.edu
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art 
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu <http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu/>
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
 
B-1 West Sibley Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853
 
 

On 4/21/20, 6:53 PM, "empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of Premesh Lalu" <empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of plalu at uwc.ac.za> wrote:

    ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------