November 2007 on -empyre- soft-skinned space: Memory Errors in the Technosphere: Art, Accident, Archive :: Moderated by Renate Ferro (US) and Tim Murray (US) with Ingrid Bachmann (Canada), Madeleine CasadOut-of-Sync (US), (Australia), Grace Quintanilla (Mexico), Monica Ross (England).

Confident reliance on the expanse of virtual memory, data bases, and archives can be easily compromised by the uncertainties of art, the surprise of accident, and the shifts of archival assumptions, if not also by those irritating computer messages announcing “memory error.” The interruption of digital memory error accentuates what Thomas Hobbes lamented in a much earlier age of technological revolution as the fragility or “decaying sense” of memory. This month’s guests on -empyre- will reflect on how the tenuous memory reserves of digital culture reinvest the complex affect of the personal in the fragile fabrics of the social. They will ponder the inscription of the cultural importance of memory and archive in the inherent masochism of their fragility when art enters into contact with archive and accident.

Ingrid Bachman (Canada) is an interdisciplinary artist who explores the complicated relationship between the material and virtual realms. Bachmann uses redundant, as well as new technologies, to create generative and interactive artworks, many of which are site-specific. She is the co-editor (with Ruth Scheuing) of Material Matters, a critical anthology on the relation of material and culture and has a chapter in a new anthology, The Object of Labor (ed. Joan Livingstone and John Ploof), published by MIT Press, 2007. Ingrid is a founding member of the Interactive Textiles and Wearable Computing Lab of Hexagram and is the Head of The Institute of Everyday Life. She is currently Associate Dean, Research and International Relations in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec.

Madeleine Casad (US) is Assistant Curator of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art and a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at Cornell University. She is interested in political aspects of memory and counter-memory in the context of digital culture and textuality, medium-specific temporalities (and aesthetics!) of information storage and retrieval, and questions related to subjectivity and “the archive.” She teaches courses on gaming, narrative, and media and is completing a dissertation about virtuality, identity, and narrative desire in literature and media art, focusing mainly on German texts and institutions.

Out-of-Sync (Australia) is a collaboration between Norie Neumark and Maria Miranda who have working collectively for over 15 years, beginning in radio and then from the early ’90s making work with CD-Roms, installations, websites and Internet installations. Currently they are working with performative encounters in public places - process based works which they document in various ways for installation. In addition to their international new media art practice, Norie is Associate Professor of Media Arts and Production at the University of Technology, Sydney, and Maria is a doctoral candidate at Macquarie University in Sydney where she is researching the performativity of mediaspace and the possibilities of a new form of sociality.

Monica Ross (England) is a British artist, based in Brighton, whose work is time based and includes performance, installation, video, CD-Rom, and text works such as valentine , a book work published by Milch, London, 2000. She was an Arts and Humanities Research Board Fellow in the Fine Art Department at the University of Newcastle from 2001-2004, where she established Connecting Principle. Her collaborative works on the net include The International Corporation of Lost Structures (ICOLS) and Matter of Fact, an e-book with An Tallentire. Her ongoing project, justfornow.net., explores the continuum between durational artworks in real time and a data based archive on line.

Grace Quintanilla (Mexico) is Artistic Director of Transitio_Mx Electronic Arts and Video Festival in Mexico City. An artist, animator, and videomaker, she studied animation at the Edinburgh Film Workshop Trust and did graduate studies in Electronic Art and Television at The School of Television and Imaging at Dundee University in Scotland. Upon returning to Mexico in the mid-1990s she made the award-wining documentary series Aventurera, and began her ongoing experimentation with digital technologies that he resulted in numerous award-winning projects.

Renate Ferro and Tim Murray
CoModerators, -empyre-
Department of Art/Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art Cornell University