[ISEA2011] Panel : Ner­min Say­basili – The Mag­netic Field of Au­dio­vi­sual Art Prac­tices

Panel Statement

Panel: Voicing Electronic Arts

The dig­i­tally me­di­ated world is a gi­gan­tic mag­net, an or­gan­is­ing force for gen­er­at­ing reg­u­la­tory ac­tiv­i­ties and rul­ing their func­tions across its mag­netic field. The task for crit­ics is to map or – even bet­ter in a sense – to elec­trify other forces op­er­at­ing within the dom­i­nant forces that gen­er­ate so­cial pres­sures. From this per­spec­tive, the paper pro­poses the term mag­netic – which I have coined – as an im­ple­ment that in­vites us to re-think the art­work be­yond its ma­te­r­ial pres­ence and ac­tual sig­ni­fi­ca­tion in dig­i­tal cul­ture. The mag­netic refers to a par­tic­u­lar con­nec­tion be­tween art and pol­i­tics in the age of global cap­i­tal­ism. The paper aims to offer an un­der­stand­ing of look­ing and lis­ten­ing as cen­tral to the process of in­ven­tive and cre­ative in­ter­pre­ta­tion of the world and the mak­ing of knowl­edge of the world. Deal­ing with the el­e­ment of voice and sound in in­stal­la­tion works, the dis­cus­sion in the paper will be cen­tred on the idea that au­dio­vi­sual art­work can be­have like a mag­net by ei­ther pulling things and peo­ple to­wards it­self as well as to each other or push­ing them apart. The mag­netic is the other name of per­for­ma­tiv­ity in­volv­ing the map­ping of the in­vis­i­ble, the tem­po­ral, the de­tach­able, the con­nectible, the re­versible, the mod­i­fi­able.

  • Ner­min Say­basili is an As­sis­tant Pro­fes­sor in the De­part­ment of Art His­tory at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts Uni­ver­sity, Is­tan­bul, Turkey. She re­ceived her doc­tor­ate in vi­sual cul­ture from Gold­smiths Col­lege, Uni­ver­sity of Lon­don. Her re­search in­ter­ests in­clude con­tem­po­rary art prac­tices and crit­i­cal the­ory with a par­tic­u­lar em­pha­sis on ‘vis­i­bil­i­ties’ and ‘in­vis­i­bil­i­ties’ in the regime of the vi­sion, the ‘el­e­ment’ of sound and voice in in­stal­la­tion work and video art, and urban space and mi­gra­tion in the net­worked cul­ture. Say­basili’s most re­cent pub­li­ca­tions in­clude es­says in Voice: Vocal Aes­thet­ics in Dig­i­tal Arts and Media Art eds. Norie Neu­mark, Ross Gib­son and Theo Van Leeuwen (The MIT Press, 2010) and Glob­al­iza­tion and Con­tem­po­rary Art ed. Jonathan Har­ris (Wigley-Black­well, forth­com­ing). Her book Bor­ders and Ghosts will be pub­lished in Turk­ish by Metis Pub­lish­ing House in 2011.

Full text (PDF) p. 2150-2155