[-empyre-] Week 1: Welcome Patrick Lichty to Flow, Impulse and Affect in Real Time

Timothy Conway Murray tcm1 at cornell.edu
Wed May 19 02:58:56 AEST 2021


Hi all,

In thinking about Patrick's theme for the month, "Flow, Impulse and Affect in Real Time," I hadn't contemplated thinking about RFTs, but more about the "flow" or "impulse" of 2021 media culture.  In my world of media theory, "flow" first takes me back to early television theory of the 80s when we thought of flow as the strategic wrapping into one seamless package of television sequences and internal advertising spots that systematically translate the viewers into the data of consumption. It may be that flow might work somewhat similarly today if we think of the succession of sequences on online media, say in Tik Tok, in correlation to the clicks of access that would similarly translate the user into consumption bits.  As Deleuze said in "Postscripts on Societies of Control," "individuals have become 'dividuals,' and masses, samples, data, markets or 'banks.'"  But I found myself very intrigued by Patrick's provocative linkage of flow to impulse and affect (in Real Time).  Does impulse disturb flow, if only in providing flow with the texture of pulsation rather than the seamless of flow?  And what might be the correlation of impulse to affect?  This certainly "grabs back" (another term from tv theory) flow from the 'dividual,' no?, in enveloping it with impulse and affect.

Rather than RFTs, I find myself looking at various interactive installations where the impulsiveness of interactivity energizes links between pulse and affect.  Who better has experimented with this than Rafael Lozana-Hemmer whose large interactive installations initiate participants into the affect of impulse.  Take the installations in his 2019 Hirshhorn show, "Pulse," which literally translated the biometric and voice data of participants in the motion and flow of room size electronic installation.   Indeed, returning to Patrick's theme, the conjoining of affect and impulse happened in 'real time' as nothing that easily could be recorded and duplicated, if we understand the piece to consist of both interactor and visual interlocutor.  Here flow, (im)pulse, and affect merge together as colossal events beckoning users to acknowledge the impulsiveness of not only their spectatorial practices but also their inscription into larger affect-filled pools of other participants and incorporated bio-data.

Just a thought about how we might "claw back" the discussion in view of contemporary installation in "Real Time."

Happy spring,

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 5/12/21, 1:08 PM, "empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of Renate Ferro" <empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of rferro at cornell.edu> wrote:

    ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
    Welcome to a short Week 1 on -empyre-.  To start things off Renate Ferro and Tim Murray will be joined by long-time -empyre- subscriber, participant and moderator, Patrick Lichty.  We are thankful to Patrick for innovating this topic and coming up with the conceptual parameters. Biographies are below.  We are hoping that this broad topic warrants an array of responses from our membership.  Just a few thoughts to get the conversation flowing. 

    The “moment”, is that moment when the body encounters the impulse of the event, to which is has to assimilate and then emote.  But in real time, this moment does not allow for assimilation, it is the constant moment of the impulse, or impulsive. This can be likened to “flow”, or the quality of being “in the zone” of 2021’s media culture. If the rapidity of images, in the flowing, impulsive space is in the contemporary now of media culture, can it then allow for reverberation,  reflection, recitation?  How might we understand the artistic or critical payoff from the impulse of media culture?

    Looking forward.  Renate Ferro

    Welcome to May 2021 on –empyre- soft-skinned space:
    Flow, Impulse and Affect in Real Time
    Moderated by Patrick Lichty and Renate Ferro

    Guests for 
    May 10th:   Week 1: Patrick Lichty, Renate Ferro, Tim Murray

    Biographies for Week 1: 
    Renate Ferro is a conceptual media artist who toggles between the creative skins of old and new technologies. Her work mobilizes opportunities for creative interactivity that incorporate issues relating to feminist psychological and sociological conditions. Ferro’s work takes on create skins whose configurations include installation, interactive net-based projects, sculpture, digital time-based media, drawing, text, and performance-based work. These creative skins include participatory, collaborative, generative, and customizable characteristics impacting the networked quality of her work.  Her artistic work has been featured at the University of Virginia, Hunter College Gallery (NYC), The Freud Museum (London), The Dorksy Gallery (NYC), The Hemispheric Institute and FOMMA (Mexico), The Janus Pannonius Muzeum (Hungary), Peking University (Beijing), Johnson Art Museum (Ithaca, NY), and Nanyang Technological University (Singapore).  Her image-based work has been published in Diacritics and Theatre Journal. Her writing has been published in journals such as Media-N and several anthologies.  

    She is the managing curator and moderator of the online international listserv, -empyre-soft-skinned space that brings together artists, theorists, and technologists. Joining the moderating team in 2007. Since 2010 she has been the curatorial moderator organizing and vetting monthly topics and guests as well as technically monitoring the moderation site and website. 

    She has taught in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning at Cornell University since 2004 as a Visiting Associate Professor teaching digital media and theory, drawing and advanced Thesis studios.  She is currently the Director of Undergraduate Studies.
    www.renateferro.net
    https://aap.cornell.edu/people/renate-ferro

    Tim Murray
    A longtime member of the -empyre- moderation team, Tim Murray is Director of the Cornell Council for the Arts, Professor of Comparative Literature and English, and Founding Curator of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art in the Cornell Library. He has curated the international exhibition “Contact Zones: The Art of CD-Rom” (https://contactzones.cit.cornell.edu), and with Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, the conceptual internet art journal, “CTHEORY Multimedia” (http://ctheorymultimedia.cornell.edu). More recently, he joined Sarah Watson and Sherry Miller Hocking on “The Experimental Television Center: A History, ETC” at Hunter College Galleries in New York City, and at Cornell, he curated “Signal to Code: 50 Years of Media Art in the Goldsen Archive” (http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/signaltocode/) as well as the 2018 and 2020 Cornell Biennials (http://cca.cornell.edu/?p=2020-biennial.
    He is awaiting production of Technics Improvised: Activating Touch in Global Media Art(Minnesota, 2022).  Among his books are Medium Philosophicum: Pensar tecnológicamente el arte (Universidad de Murcia, 2021), Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds (Minnesota, 2008), Zonas de Contacto: el arte en CD-Rom (Centro de la Imagen, 1999), Drama Trauma: Specters of Race and Sexuality in Performance, Video, Art (Routledge, 1997), Like a Film: Ideological Fantasy on Screen, Camera, and Canvas (Routledge, 1993), ed. Xu Bing’s Background Story and his Oeuvre (Mandarin), co-edited with Yang Shin-Yi (Life Bookstore Publishing, 2016), ed. with Irving Goh of The Prepositional Senses of Jean-Luc Nancy, 2 Vols., diacritics (2014-16), and ed., Mimesis, Masochism & Mime: The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought (Michigan, 1997).
    Week 2
    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.

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



    On 5/10/21, 5:26 PM, "empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of Renate Ferro" <empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of rferro at cornell.edu> wrote:

        ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
        Hello all, 

        Welcome to the May, 2021 discussion on -empyre- soft-skinned space.  This month we welcome Patrick Lichty, a long-time moderator with -empyre-. Patrick has been teaching in the UAE for the past four years and has recently moved back to the states accepting a position at Winona State University.  A warm welcome to Patrick and we look forward to this month’s discussion.

        Paul Virilio, in Speed Pollution, said that Real-Space is giving way to Real-Time. This expands from his work in Art of the Motor, in which transportation is collapsing space to where communications technologies, like Twitch and Zoom, are further collapsing time.  This turns communication back to the synchronous; away from voice mail to the site of, “You have had to have been there.”  Facebook live broadcasts, TikTok streams, and Twitch.tv communities privilege the real-time experience over the temporally mediated.

        Yet, the existential space of real-time is in, the Massumian sense, deeply affective.  The constant stream of ad extem existence calls to be constantly in the moment. The “moment”, is that moment when the body encounters the impulse of the event, to which is has to assimilate and then emote.  But in real time, this moment does not allow for assimilation, it is the constant moment of the impulse, or impulsive. This can be likened to “flow”, or the quality of being “in the zone” of 2021’s media culture. 

        I will be introducing our guests this week and their biographies tomorrow.  If anyone would like to be a guest this month please write to Renate back channel.  Of course we welcome all of our participants to be active this month as well.  
        Thanks. Renate

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



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