The -empyre- online list (Sydney) is an international, moderated discussion of international media arts and culture. Its special focus is on critical perspectives of contemporary cross-disciplinary issues, practices, and events in networked media. As an independent, non-hierarchical community and collaborative, -empyre- began in 2002 and is moderated by an international panel who chooses guests and topics, and moderates discussions to retain thematic integrity. On -empyre- each month the moderators program a specific topic for discussion and feature a group of special guests drawn from a wide range of practices in visual culture, new media, contemporary art, sound arts, performance, and activism. The list is hosted at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, Sydney.
Founded: 2002 Frequency: new program monthly; post continuous (daily) Editor-in-chief: Christina McPhee Editors: Moderating team: Melinda Rackham (AU), Sergio Basbaum (BR), Marcus Bastos (BR), Nicholas Ruiz III (US), Renate Ferro (US), Timothy Murray (US), Tracey Meziane (AU), Christina McPhee (US)
www.subtle.net/empyre
"SHOOTER" and -empyre- : "Bare Life, Ghost Detainees, Exclusion and Performance"
In 2000-2001 Peter Sinclair and I developed an immersive, interactive laser and 3D sound art work called Shooter, the piece allowed the viewer to walk into a darkened room laced with red lasers. Passing through a laser triggered sounds that were fed to the 3D sound space. The sounds included, firearms, guns, explosion, video arcade sounds and xenophobic rants. The piece was about Bush’s buildup to war and video games. When a person walked into the room they became the target.
GH Hovagimyan
‘The sacred man is the one whom the people have judged on account of a
crime. It is not permitted to sacrifice this man, yet he who kills him
= will not be condemned for homicide; in the first Tiburtinian law, in
fact, it is noted that ‘if someone kills the one who is sacred
according to the plebiscite, it will not be considered homicide’. This
is why it is customary for a bad or impure man to be called sacred.
[Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer, 1995, p. 71] In America, a large part of
the political discourse occurs in mass media I.E. television, radio,
newspapers, this is a supra-discourse and functions as the media-logos
(from Regis Debray) of American technocracy. Being included in mass
media is a verification of citizenship in the society. It is one of the
reasons that reality television is so popular. In 1993 I did my first
internet piece, Terrorist Advertising,
http://www.artnetweb.com/gh/terror/ ,it pointed out the media-logos
dynamic. “We live in a media saturated environment. Family,
neighborhood, vocation, religion, and ethnic affiliation have been
replaced by media driven identities. The spectacle created by the
television daytime talk shows illustrates how media attention changes
people. Consider how relatively ordinary people are perceived as more
important and possibly more real than they do in their daily lives,
after they appear on television for any trivial or far-fetched reason.”
-Terrorist Advertising, pg. 2” There are several dynamics at work in
the human instinct for tribe and community on the one hand and
exclusion or expulsion on the other. There is a coming of age instinct
that compels a person to separate from their family and tribe to seek a
mate and create a new family. This is a positive exclusion. This
particular instinct has been codified in mass media advertising as
sexuality and is used to sell everything. It also creates a dynamic
that associates tribal groups with lifestyles and product logos.
Someone who doesn’t have the right logos on their clothing and
possessions is not one of your tribe and must be expelled. Agamben
argues that the Greek understanding of politics contained two
conceptions of life: zoe, or bare life, which is distinguished from
bios, or politically or morally qualified life, the particular form of
life of a community. The constitution of the political is made possible
by an exclusion of bare life from political life that simultaneously
makes bare life a condition of politics. In contrast to arguments that
understand political community as essentially a common ‘belonging’ in a
shared national, ethnic, religious, or moral identity, Agamben argues
that ‘the original political relation is the ban in which a mode of
life is actively and continuously excluded or shut out (ex-claudere)
from the polis. The decision as to what constitutes the life that is
thereby taken outside of the polis is a sovereign decision. Sovereignty
is therefore not a historically specific form of political authority
that arises with modern nation-states and their conceptualization by
Hobbes and Bodin, but rather the essence of the political. The
sovereign decision as a cut in life, one that separates real life from
merely existent life, political and human life from the life of the
non-human. Consequently, there is a difference for Agamben between
biopolitical life and bare life:----the former being the managed
political subject of power relations, and the latter being the
necessary negative referent by which power-relations (through the
sovereign exception) demarcates what counts as legal life, life that
matters. So that there is a limit, or an ‘outside’ to power relations
in biopolitical life.” –from philosophy.com , Posted by Gary
Sauer-Thompson at May 4, In 2000-2001 Peter Sinclair and I developed an immersive, interactive laser and 3D sound art work called Shooter,
the piece allowed the viewer to walk into a darkened room laced with
red lasers. Passing through a laser triggered sounds that were fed to
the 3D sound space. The sounds included, firearms, guns, explosion,
video arcade sounds and xenophobic rants. The piece was about Bush’s
buildup to war and video games. When a person walked into the room they
became the target. For our next collaborative piece we did a
performance work called, Rant/ Rant Back/ Back Rant:“Peter Sinclair
created a special interface to sample voice input, manipulate it and
send it back into the general audio mix in real time. GH projects the
ramblings of a borderline schizoid personality type who = can’t tell
the difference between media news information, gossip and paranoid
rumors. The piece is a techno driven word or poetry jam that resembles
the ranting of a delusional street person. GH prepared the content by
clipping news articles and posting them on a web in a blog called
rantblog PTP (power to the people).”
http://nujus.net/gh_04/gallery9.html The sacred man of Agamben’s
equation is quite interesting. This sacred man is outside of society.
By the way, he doesn’t say sacred woman. I believe in Roman society
that sacred women were integrated into the culture and had an honored
position. In any case, I believe that the sacred man can be equated
with the artist, at least in modern times as being one who is operating
outside the political culture. This sacred man can also be equated with
the terrorist or perhaps the forces of exclusion create the dual
impulse for art and terrorism. As I documented the language being used
in the global media-logos for my rant performances I was struck by its
manipulative and emotive power. Such phrases as, ghost detainees and
extreme rendition were chillingly concise. The ghost detainee in
particular highlights the idea of bare life. Even in a POW camp there
is a political society by not registering the incoming prisoner he
became a sacred man in extreme rendition a terrorist suspect is
snatched from the street and taken to a secret place to be questioned
(and tortured). Agamben also talks about the tattoo, the retinal scan
and the barcode as tools to create a global techno-identity database
similar to the tattooing of prisoners in Nazi concentration camps. With
the 21st century global information networks comes a media driven
polis. The positions of bare life and the sacred man are situated in
this media-polis. The terrorists use the internet to present their
message and recruit new members. Artists such as myself use the
internet to critique the global polis. The question is this; do my
actions and that of terrorists constitute normal political discourse in
a global techno society? Furthermore is expulsion or bare life negation
created by denying access to or recognition of a person in the web and
internet and mass media?—GH
G. H. Hovagimyan (US)---------------------------> GH is an experimental cross media, new media and performance artist who lives and works in New York City. He is one of the first artists in New York to start working in Internet Art, beginning in 1993, with such artists’ online groups as the thing, ArtNetWeb, and Rhizome.His new work involves mash-ups online with new art dirt redux at http://=20 nujus.net/gh/ and http://post.thing.net/gh/
