Panel Statement
Panel: Unsitely Aesthetics: the Reconfiguring of Public Space in Electronic Art
We understand Uncertain Aesthetics to be a critical component in the performative spaces between contemporary conceptions of networks. The surge of digital accumulation, the continual surprise of informational texture and the layers of expressive multiplicity are what lend networks their creative power – as networks interface both real and virtual spaces. We are attracted in our curatorial and artistic work to projects that capitalize on the expansiveness of the digital and that confront the user with the realities of undisciplined knowledge. Undisciplined, that is, as we embrace it from within the legacy of interactivity, a practice that both solicits the user to respond to a set of predetermined choices and gives itself over to the users’ momentary stages, creating works whose algorithms leave them incomplete.
- Renate Ferro is a media artist working in emerging technology and culture. Her artistic practice reflects critical interactivity incorporating social and theoretical paradigms of the psychological and sociological condition with networks of technology. Most recently her work has been featured at The Dorksy Gallery (NY, US), The Hemispheric Institute and FOMMA (Mexico), and The Janus Pannonius Muzeum (Hungary). Her work has been published in such journals as Diacritics, Theatre Journal, and Epoch. She is a co-moderator for the online new media list serve -EMPYRE-soft-skinned space and the art/imaging editor of the journal DIACRITICS published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. Renate Ferro is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Art at Cornell University teaching digital media and theory. She also directs the Tinker Factory, a creative research lab for Research Design, Creativity and Interdisciplinary Technology. renateferro.net subtle.net/empyre goldsen.library.cornell.edu muse.jhu.edu/journals/diacritics tinkerfactory.net
- Timothy Murray is Director of the Society for the Humanities, Professor of Comparative Literature and English, and Curator of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, at Cornell University, US. He is co-moderator of the -empyre—soft-skinned space, new media listserv and the author of 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); Theatrical Legitimation: Allegories of Genius in XVIIth-Century England and France (Oxford, 1987). He is editor of Mimesis, Masochism & Mime: The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought (Michigan, 1997) and, with Alan Smith, Repossessions: Psychoanalysis and the Phantasms of Early-Modern Culture (Minnesota, 1997). His curatorial projects include CTHEORY MULTIMEDIA and Contact Zones: The Art of the CD-Rom. ctheorymultimedia.cornell.edu contactzones.cit.cornell.edu
Full text (PDF) p. 813-816