April on -empyre-: Border Crossings

April on -empyre- soft-skinned space : Border Crossings:



Do conceptual art and curatorial practice merge in post digital
cultural production? How are new media art, criticism and curatorial
practice a 'transgressive' ecology"?


This month, please join the artists' group Glorious Ninth (UK),
together with InteractivA 05 artist/curator Raul Ferrara-Balanquet
(MX) and new media artist/editor Eduardo Navas (US) as we consider
cultural production as a border condition, ethically and aesthetically,
locally and internationally, in simultaneously personal and public
spaces.

We will trace crossovers and transgressions from the psychic space of
internet art practice and psychoanalytic theory, to the social space of
a local/international new media festival and back again.
We follow the impulse noted by Ryan Griffis in "subRational eRuptions"
on <http://turbulence.org>, recalling the Frankfurt School theorists,
to combine studies of unconscious or subliminal desire with economic
realities in a provocative synthesis.

Join Glorious Ninth (UK) in a discussion of net art practice relative
to Matrix Theory, a post-Lacanian theory of trans-subjectivity and
'witness' in the face of traumatic catastrophe, developed by
Israeli-French artist and Bracha Ettinger, whose insights I first
learned of on Jordan Crandall's UnderFire project, at Witte de With
Center for Contemporary Art <http://www.wdw.nl/underfire-archive/>
Glorious Ninth writes, "Within Bracha Ettinger's Matrix Theory,
borderlines, thresholds and limits are continually transgressed and
dissolved, allowing new borderlines to emerge, to be crossed and to
fade. Our work comes about through an inter-weaving of ethics and
aesthetics. Aurally, visually and conceptually our pieces ebb and
flow, and the elements within the pieces co-emerge and co-fade in
ever-changing patterns that constantly shift focus."
<http://gloriousninth.com>

Raul Ferrara-Balanquet and Eduardo Navas join Glorious Ninth to extend
the conversation into a focus on public/ social space and cultural
production in a post digital world.
Raul Ferrara-Balanquet's InteractivA project in Merida, Yucatan, is an
annual interdisciplinary laboratory that employs an alternative vision
of the art. He writes, " I don't consider myself an authority, but a
curator with a vision closer to the production of a proposal like a
work of art; a vision that consider the economic reality of artistic
production in the region where I live; and, one that tries to create
communities of exchange to enrich our social process of apprenticeship
and development." <http://www.cartodigital.org/interactiva/>

Eduardo Navas has founded and sustained the online critical resource
Net Art Review since 2002. Net Art Review focuses on net-art and its
crossover to other fields in new media. In a recent article on
blogging as cultural production, Navas calls for a "constant
reinvestment in culture: the arena where, regardless of late
postmodernist cynicism, meaning can still be questioned; this is a time
when theories are extended through theory, and metas are referenced
through meta." <http://netartreview.net>



Please join us this month at <http://subtle.net/empyre>



–cm


About our guests:


———————————–>Eduardo Navas is an
interdiciplinary artist who develops projects in music, performance art
and new media. Navas is founder and contributing editor of Net Art
Review <http://www.netartreview.net>, and was Assistant Professor at
Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles from August 2001 - May 2003,
where he taught technical and theoretical multimedia principles in the
Art and Art History Department. Eduardo Navas currently continues his
studies in the Art History, Theory, and Criticism Ph.D. program at
University of California in San Diego as a 2003 - 2007 Cota Robles
graduate Fellow. <http://www.navasse.net>.



———————————–>Glorious Ninth / Kate Southworth
and Patrick Simons have been working together on Internet art projects
since 2000. Their work explores personal, social and historical
phenomena each using a variety of aesthetic, political, theoretical and
conceptual approaches. Glorious Ninth have exhibited Internet art
projects at galleries and museums including Newlyn Gallery, Cornwall,
Evergreen Cultural Centre, British Columbia, Canada and the Irish Film
Centre, Dublin. They are featured in several net art databases
including Martin Wattenberg's Net Art Idea Line on the Whitney Museum's
Artport site, Rhizome Artbase, and Soundtoys. Glorious Ninth appears
in Net:Reality, A UK national touring exhibition of New Media artworks
which simultaneously exist within networked and physical space, and
Artytechs Parlour, Port Eliot Literary Festival, St. Germans, Cornwall.
Kate Southworth is leader of the Interactive Art & Design Research
Cluster, and Course Leader of MA Interactive Art & Design, at
University College Falmouth, Cornwall. Patrick Simons is a composer
and sound artist. He makes artistic enquiries into the material world
and tries to communicate his findings using many different approaches
to data mapping.His most recent soundwork 'd-flat01' which recently was
exhibited in the elevator as part of the science-art exhibition
Blip@Newlyn, is included in the current edition of drunken boat
(<http://www.drunkenboat.com>).



————————————>Raul Ferrera-Balanquet migrated
to the United States in 1980 during the Mariel Boat Lift.