[ISEA2004] Paper: Norie Neumark & Maria Miranda – E.motional Perturbations

Abstract

As digital culture and media develop and re/shape experience, they also colour e.motions. The aim of this paper is to explore e.motions in media(ted) experiences of digital culture. Emotion, or e.motion, can be understood as the movement of embodied affect– within and between bodies– as feelings that are in bodies and that move bodies. We jump with joy, we recoil with fear and when sadness weighs down our hearts, our limbs turn to lead. E.motions also move between bodies and machines and relay through networks, perturbing everyday life. We will engage with these perturbations through two or three case studies of electronic and new media artwork, including our own work in the pataphysical new media art project, The Perpetual E.motions Project. In this project, we have set up a fictive institute –the Institute for the Study of Perpetual E.motion. The Perpetual E.motions Project involves both a networked performance and an internet art work, which take as their starting point an understanding of e.motions as physical as well as cultural. We are also interested in the way recent neurobiological attention to emotion is reminiscent of an earlier concern with measurement of motion; in particular the work of Etienne-Jules Marey. Many of the e.motional machines in the internet work are Marey machines that re-map the e.motions which were left out of Marey’s original motion studies. The Perpetual E.motions Project also involves a networked performance, Sea.nce, which focuses on emotions in networked relay. Seances and ouija boards, which historically were popular ‘parlour games’, can also be understood as ‘networked’ events (networking across the ether between the living and the dead). In the discussion of The Perpetual E.motions Project we will focus on the ways that networking and media(tion) perturb and are perturbed by the relays of e.motion.

  • Maria Miranda (aka Max) is a visual/new media artist. Recently she completed her MVA at Sydney College of the Arts. She has worked as a graphic designer, been involved in community radio and drawn comix. In 1989 she co-edited Drawing Away: an australian women’s comic book. For the last ten years Maria has collaborated with Norie Neumark, as Out-of-Sync, making CD-Roms, installations, and internet art works, which have been exhibited internationally.
  • Norie Neumark is a sound/radio and new media artist. Her radiophonic works have been commissioned and broadcast by the Listening Room, ABC Classic FM in Australia and broadcast by New Radio and the Performing Arts in the US. Norie is Associate Professor in Media Arts and Production at the University of Technology, Sydney. She co-edited At a Distance: precursors to internet art and activism. (forthcoming MIT Press, 2005). Out-of-Sync has an artist studio on Turbulence.org   turbulence.org/studios/rumor

Full text (PDF) p. 42-48