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

Fri Apr 24 20:54:26 AEST 2020

Dear all,

Thanks, Junting, and of course, Tim and Renate, for this opportunity to
read comments from the one-of-a-kind Empyre community regarding the current
situation and share my opinion about it. It is not easy to articulate
something which makes sense in these days, yet it’s worth a shot. I will
try to do my best.

To the question, how COVID is affecting everyone’s work, I would like to
reply, taking into account my interest in cinema and, therefore, in the
moving image. I am in Italy now. I arrived here on March 21, and since that
day, I’ve been monitoring at how media and public intellectuals have been
covering the pandemic. On the one hand, there is an ongoing discussion
among philosophers, originated by Agamben – a piece that, I think, most of
you are aware of (you may find something here:
https://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/coronavirus-and-philosophers/). All
in all, that debate has been regarded as a discussion unable to give any
form of theoretical guidance to comprehend the crisis, making more and more
reasonable the assertion that one should rethink the role of theory as a
supposedly grand narrative of the present. In this regard, I found
particularly striking the passage from Merleau-Ponty – his letter to Sartre
– that Gary Hall quoted in one of his interventions. To avoid the “trap of
existing discourses,” it almost seems that theory should gain (or regain?)
the status of an anachronistic practice or, perhaps, that of a minor one –
using the term minor in a Deleuzian sense.

On the other hand, though, the efforts that most of the journalists made
are incredible, extremely accurate in providing stories and contexts.
Social networks helped, too – if possible, I would like to share a post
from someone I know, a press officer from Bergamo, who described the
situation there with a justifiable mix of anger and sadness.

Thus, overall, those media one might call “static” (newspaper, photography)
did their job. Yet the contagion, the movement in itself, seems to be the
missing ring in this scenario. Even if someone may talk about the
“metaphysics of patient zero” (
https://www.diacriticsjournal.com/the-metaphysics-of-patient-zero/),
Italy’s inability to pinpoint the physical origin of the spreading (that
invisible Soo Yon Lee mentioned) has meant the impossibility to give form
(representation) to the virus movement. And, therefore, control it
partially (which is always better than nothing). The results, at least in
terms of imaginary, is that of living in a sort of hallucination. For
example, I am writing these words in my room, and outside the sun is
shining, and it looks like the umpteenth ordinary day in my life – my
province has a ridiculously low percentage of cases, so I can say that I am
safe. However, the media surfaces in my home (televisions, computers)
remind me that deaths, up in the North, haven’t vanished. Those images,
though, do not reveal anything new or detailed in their visuals. In
essence, it is an endless documentary in which press conferences and
hospitals feature as the only possible settings at play. Visuality does not
equal understanding. For this, it makes sense that a cinematically mediocre
film like “Contagion” (S. Soderbergh, 2011) is back in fashion as the
cinematic anticipation of this catastrophe. It is certainly true for its
staging.

Lastly, I would like to ask to all if you have opinions on a topic that, if
I am not wrong (if so, I apologize), turns out to be absent in our thread
so far. Namely, the nature of the next idea of globalization that COVID is
fatally contributing to create.
As far as I know, the lack of a coordinated response in Europe entailed a
series of misalignments among countries, something that surely had some
impact on the spreading. The same story inside Italy, where we have
Region-based legislation concerning health policies. Undoubtedly, the
contagion is global, yet a global response has been missing. The world is
far from being “synchronous,” even in the media field. For example, I am
sure that if we had had a better set of data of what happened in China –
more press coverage of Chinese newspapers and journals; more translations –
we wouldn’t ever considered Wuhan as the usual distant East in February.
And perhaps Italy and Europe would have taken different choices.

Recently, I ran into an Italian online blog that republished Carlo
Ginzburg’s “Killing a Chinese Mandarin: The Moral Implications of Distance”
(it seems available via Jstor). I had never read it, so I did it. In my
view, it is worth reading it even today, at least to the extent that it
highlights the presence of some features belonging to the inherent vice
that still informs the core of the current conception of globalization.

Stay safe and connected,

Il giorno gio 23 apr 2020 alle ore 17:22 Renate Ferro <rferro at cornell.edu>
ha scritto:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> 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
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu

-- 
*Gianluca Pulsoni*

Ph. D. Student at Cornell University
On academia.edu: https://cornell.academia.edu/GianlucaPulsoni

*Ah well, after all, history only tastes bitter to those who expected it to
be sugar-coated*
Chris Marker, *Sunless*
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