Fwd: [-empyre-] Liquid Narrative for June 2006

hi all, I am not sure we got this message out to Rhizome!

Please join our guests this month, Dene Grigar (US), Jim Barrett
(AU/SE), Lucio Santaella (BR), and Sergio Basbaum (BR) , with
moderator Marcus Bastos (BR), for a spirited discussion of "Liquid
Narratives" —– digital media story telling with a dash, perhaps,
of 'aura' .

Here's the intro from Marcus:

Begin forwarded message:

> From: "marcus bastos" <[email protected]>
> Date: June 1, 2006 6:00:23 AM PDT
> To: soft_skinned_space <[email protected]>
> Subject: [-empyre-] Liquid Narratives: opening and guest's bios
> Reply-To: soft_skinned_space <[email protected]>
>
> The topic of June at the - empyre - mailing list will be Liquid
> Narratives. The concept of 'liquid narrative' is interesting in that
> it allows to think about the unfoldings of contemporary languages
> beyond tech achievements, by relating user controlled applications
> with formats such as the essay (as described by Adorno in "Der Essay
> als Form", The essay as a form) and procedures related to the figure
> of the narrator (as described by Benjamin in his writings about
> Nikolai Leskov).
>
> Both authors are accute critics of modern culture, but a lot of his
> ideas can be expanded towards contemporary culture. As a matter of
> fact, one of the main concerns in Benjamin's essay is a description of
> how the rise of modernism happens on account of an increasing
> privilege of information over knowledge, which is even more intense
> nowadays. To understand this proposal, it is important to remember how
> Benjamin distinguishes between an oral oriented knowledge, that
> results from 'an experience that goes from person to person' and is
> sometimes anonymous, from the information and authoritative oriented
> print culture.
>
> One of the aspects of this discussion is how contemporary networked
> culture rescues this 'person to person' dimension, given the
> distributed and non-authoritative procedures that technologies such as
> the GPS, mobile phones and others stimulate. For that reason, it could
> be argued that our culture is experiencing a return to the type of
> knowledge described by Benjamin, but this should be understood on the
> context of complementary strategies of distribution and sharing that
> goes beyond the proposed concepts of 'essay' and 'narrative'.
>
> McLuhan also describes portions of this process, when he writes about
> 'the reconfigured galaxy' that results from the impact of mass media
> on a culture previously dominated by books, in which he implies, among
> other things, that our cultural rescues orality as a form of knowledge
> circulation. This is precise when we think about electronic media.
> Digital technologies are more and more oriented into collaborative and
> programable processes, wich allow collective and recombinant
> procedures that are very different from those described by McLuhan,
> but curiosly related to the procedures of Benjamin's Narrator.
>
> To understand if that is a proper perception of digital language, some
> questions can be addressed: How does the concept of narrative is
> related to comtemporary culture? Can we really describe nowadays
> fragmentary and user related procedures of organizing data as
> narratives? Should they be considered liquid, since they are fluid,
> reshapable, pliable? How does devices such as the GPS and mobile
> phones change narrative? How technologies broadband internet and DVD
> allow other modes of organizing them?
>
> To debate this topic, this month, we welcome Dene Grigar, Lucia
> Santaella, James Barret and Sergio Basbaum. They will discuss how
> their projects and ideas can be related to the notion of 'liquid
> narratives', or explain how they have been thinking about connected
> concepts.
>
> + Dene Grigar is an Associate Professor of English at Texas Woman's
> University and specializes in new media, interactive arts, electronic
> literature, rhetoric, and Greek literature and culture. Her book New
> Worlds, New Words: Exploring Pathways In and About Electronic
> Environments (with John Barber, Hampton Press, 2001) speculates about
> the ways in which writing and thinking change when moved to electronic
> environments, such as the World Wide Web, MOOs, and email. She is
> Associate Editor of Leonardo Reviews and International Editor for
> Computers and Composition. Her second book, Defiance and Decorum:
> Women, Public Rhetoric, and Activism (with Laura Gray and Kay
> Robinson) looks at the way women have used Rhetoric to achieve social
> and political goals. Her specific focus in this book is to examine new
> media artists and their particular methods of activism. Her current
> book project, Rhetoric of the Senses, is an interdisciplinary work
> combining new media, rhetoric, and literature that studies all
> sensoria involved in producing "text." In 2001 she attended a National
> Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar at UCLA led by N.
> Katherine Hayles, an experience that led her to undertake, from
> 2002-4, a post-doctoral study with the Planetary Collegium (formerly
> the Center of Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts-Science
> Technology and Art Research, CAiiA-STAR) located at the University of
> Plymouth, in the UK. Her current new media project, "When Ghosts Will
> Die," is a narrative performance-installation created with multimedia
> artist, Steve Gibson.
>
> + James 'Jim' Barrett (http://www.soulsphincter.blogspot.com/) is a
> PhD candidate with the Department of Modern Languages and HUMlab at
> Umea University in the north of Sweden. Of Australian origin he has
> lived internationally since 1996. His Masters thesis (2003) carried
> the title Chronotope and Cybertexts: Bakhtinian Theory for Tracing
> Sources of Narrative in Interactive Virtual Environments: From 'Naked
> Lunch' to Fast
> City. He continues working with M. M. Bakhtin's concepts of chronotope
> (time space) and dialogics in the study of digital texts. James is a
> poet, sound artist and installation performer. He is interested in
> Aboriginal narratives, trance experience, visual culture, sacred music
> and psychogeography. He plays didgeridoo (Yidaki), several other
> instruments and is one of the founders of the net label Music Your
> Mind Will Love You.
>
> + Lucia Santaella (http://www.pucsp.br/~lbraga) is full professor at
> Sao Paulo Catholic University (PUCSP), PhD in Literary Theory
> (1973-PUCSP) and Livre-docente in Communication Studies
> (1993-ECA/USP). She is the director of CIMID, Center of Research in
> Digital Media, PUCSP, and also the director of the Center for Peirce
> Studies. She directed the Brazilian side of a PROBRAL research project
> (Brasil-Germany/Capes-DAAD) on word and image relations in the media,
> from 2000 to 2003. She was also the director of other collective
> research projects: "Technical Images: from the industrial mechanical
> to the electronic post industrial world ", PUC/SP-FINEP, 1989-1991; a
> thematic research project on "The advent of new technologies and the
> new sound grammars", financed by FAPESP, 1992-1995; the collective
> project, "Production and diffusion of scientific research in the
> digital era", financed by FAPESP, 1999-2002. She is one of the
> honorary Presidents of the Latin-American Federation of Semiotics and
> a correspondent member of the Argentinian Academy of Arts, since 2002.
> She is also one of the Vice-President of the Associacion Mundial de
> Semiotica Massmediatica y Comunicacion Global, Mexico, since
> 2004. She
> is a member of the Advisory Board of the Peirce Edition Project in
> Indianapolis, USA. In 1987 , she was guest professor at the Freie
> Universitat, Berlin (DAAD). She was also associate researcher at the
> Research Center for Language and Semiotic Studies, Bloomington,
> Indiana University, where a number of post-doctoral research projects
> were accomplished, from 1988 to 1994. Several research projects were
> also developed in Germany (Kassel, Berlin, Dagstuhl/sponsored by
> Fapesp-DAAD) from 1995 on. She is presently an associate member of the
> Interdisziplinare Arbeitsgruppe fur Kulturforschung, Universitat
> Kassel. From 1982 to 1990, Lucia Santaella was the President of the
> Brazilian Semiotic Association. From 1991-93, she was the Secretary of
> the National Association of Graduate Programs in Communication
> (COMPOS, Brasil). In 1988, she was elected member of the Council of
> the Semiotic International Institute (Finland). In 1989, she was
> elected Vice-president of the International Semiotic Association. She
> was re-elected for this position in 1994-1999. In 1993, she was
> elected member of the Executive Council of the Latin American
> Federation of Aesthetics. In 1996, she was elected Vice-president of
> the Latin American Federation of Semiotics. From 1999 to 2002, she was
> the President of the Latin American Federation of Semiotics.
>
> + Sergio Roclaw Basbaum (http://www.globalstrike.net) was born in 1964
> in Sao Paulo, Brazil, where he still lives and teaches. He has
> studied
> music, and graduated in Cinema at USP (Universidade de Sao Paulo).
> While studying cinema, he started to melt his interests on sounds and
> images in a research on synesthesia in the arts, which eventually has
> led to a master dissertation and a book  "Syneathesia, art and
> technology - the foundings of Chromossonia", released in 2002. In
> his recent PhD thesis, presented in 2005 at the Comunication and
> Semiothics program at the Catholic University of Sao Paulo (PUC-SP),
> he has expanded this discussion for questions of perception and art in
> a broader sense, bringing Maurice Meleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of
> Perception into a dialogue with contemporary technological culture,
> giving that well known authors such as Walter Benjamin and Marshall
> McLuhan give emphasis to the perceptual impact of technology but do
> not make clear what they mean by "perception". This conversation has
> been enriched with some of Martin Heidegger's and Vilem Flusser's
> thinking abouth technology, as also as with some anthropology of the
> senses, by Constance Classen and David Howes. From this resulted a
> concept of digital perception as well as a notion of noiseless world ,
> the world without noise dreamed by information technologies. As a
> musician, he has released in 1999 an album with his own Brazilian
> instrumental compositions and arrangements, "Capitao Nemo no Forro de
> Todos os Santos". He's married to Tereza. They have one daughter ,
> Luiza (six y.o.), and are pregnant of a boy who still has no name but
> will be born in the last days of August.
> —————————————————
> Marcus Bastos
> http://pfebril.net
> http://www.pucsp.br/~marcusbastos
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