Wednesday, November 01, 2006

November on -empyre- looks great

November 2006 on -empyre- soft-skinned space:

THE WORK OF ART IN THE AGE OF A NOISELESS WORLD

Please join Hamed Taheri (DE), Johannes Birringer (UK), Michelle
Kasprzak
(UK), Maria Moreira (BR), and Miguel Leal (PT).

subscribe at http://www.subtle.net/empyre

Seventy years ago, Walter Benjamin wrote his insightful essay on the impact of technical reproducibility of art on the way we perceive, receive and understand the concept of art in itself. Few articles have had such a lasting impact on debates about the relations among technology, art works, perception and culture as Benjamin's
masterpiece.

Trying to take advantage of some of Benjamin's insights, but assuming we are now under a radically distinct social and cultural landscape, -empyre- welcomes some guests' insights on "the work of art in the age of a noiseless world", and the alternatives we may have for the work of art as a practice of perceptual guerrila.

If we assume that technologies are - even if for war purposes, as most of the digital apparatuses have been -, developed taking certain notions of a "better life" as its goals, they carry with them a certain utopia, related to the knowledge matrix and values from which they emerge: they intend to help to build such a world. We ask if there is - and if so, what it is - the utopia embedded on digital informational technology. The cybernetic paradigm aims a world of perfect informational flux - that is, a world without noise. We are faced with the puzzling paradox that, in such a context, even a significant field of art-works and art-activism developed as "social noise" are forced, in order to circulate through digital networks, to formalize themselves in noiseless terms - those demanded by digital apparatus.

Please join our guests for conversation on "the work of art in the age of a noiseles world" at http://www.subtle.net/empyre

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