[-empyre-] Welcome to Week 2: Rebecca Rouse, Jon Epstein, and Alan Sondheim

[Renate Ferro]

Welcome to Week 2 of Flow, Impulse, and Affect in Real Time.  Introducing three new guests this week and their biographies below:  Rebecca Rouse, Jon Epstein, Alan Sondheim. 

We had a relatively slow start because of technical issues this week so our apologies for that . Patrick has laid the foundation for his thinking about flow, etc.  I think that the topic is expansive and I hope you will respond to Patrick but also introduce your own work, how you feel the topic resonates with that work, and anything else you feel would prompt a discussion between the three of you, the moderators and our subscribers.

I see flow in relationship to networks and ecological systems, impulse to frenetic energy, quick reactions, instinct, and of course affect to sensation and sensing.  Grounded in our contemporary culture there are certainly flows between the analog and the digital.  From NFT's and crypo-currency to the flow of images and videos streamed via social media there is a sensibility that I hope we will flush out this month via the work and thinking of our guests. Then of course there is the affect that a world wide pandemic has had on these issues. 

Thanks Patrick for getting things started and welcome to Rebecca, Jon and Alan.  I encourage our -empyre- subscribers to post freely and share the flow of your thoughts. 

Happy Monday. Renate

Biographies: 
Rebecca Rouse, PhD (Senior Lecturer in Media Arts, Aesthetics & Narration in the School of Informatics’ Division of Game Development, University of Skövde, Sweden)
My research focuses on storytelling with new technologies. What kinds of stories can we tell with emerging media like augmented and mixed reality? I work with community partners to create collaborative work with students and community members in digital cultural heritage and co-created placemaking. I also research the theoretical and historical aspects of emerging technologies, and develop work across museums, cultural heritage sites, interactive installations, moveable books, and theatrical performance. All of my work comes together around investigating and inventing new modes of storytelling. For more information visit www.rebeccarouse.com. 

Jonathon Epstein is a Sociologist and public intellectual living in Winston Salem, NC. He has a PhD in Sociology and is the author of books and anthologies like Adolescents and their Music and The Baudrillard Reader.

Alan Sondheim is a city-based new media artist, codeworker, writer,
and performer concerned with the phenomeology of the virtual. He
has collaborated with motion capture studios and virtual
environment labs. He has worked at Eyebeam among other venues. His
work is concerned with the inhabitation of the body in the virtual;
with the textuality of the body; with the problematic of mixed
reality and codework (he wrote a seminal essay on the last). His
writing is known for its "somatic grit" and skeletal codes that
partially appear within and determine the surface. This problematic
style embeds the interferences among syntax, semantics, and formal
systems. The textual body and body of text are deply entangled. His
current work in text and video is based on concepts of dispersion,
miasma, and violence, as well as the psychogeography of worlds and
their modeling. Most recently he has focused on "semantic ghosting"
- the body behind the symbolic body behind the virtual body - and
models of viral dispersion and texts in a series of videos and
essays.


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