January 2008 on -empyre- soft-skinned space: Stations, Sites and Volatile Landscapes with Naeem Mohaiemen, Katherine Carl, Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss, Nat Muller and John Haber

In the wake of the post-war Situationists, the seventies Moebius-strip concept of “site/non-site” initiated a dynamic of ironic play as if subjectivity and the art object interpolated freely, to project a new participatory space. On offer was a new kind of public transgression, produced at ground level. Post 9/11, new media is “after the net.” What follows in the traces of the site/non-site? Globalization inflects locality through branding, privatization and glamour from the top down. The ubiquity of digital tools as integrated circuitry within hypercapitalism and war opens onto an ethical problem for media arts - how to extend free modes of encounter: here sites become stations.

Naeem Mohaiemen (BD/US) works in Dhaka/New York, using video, archive and text. Areas of investigation include national security panic, failed revolutionary movements, and the slippage between utopia and dystopia.Projects include a multiyear investigation of hysterical conditions (Visible Collective, disappearedinamerica.org), My Camera Can Lie? (UK House of Lords), and Sartre Kommt Nacht Stammheim (Pavillion).

Katherine Carl (School of Missing Studies) (US) is writing her PhD on conceptual art of the sixties and seventies in the former Yugoslavia in the Department of Art History and Criticism at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, and currently holds a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. For two years in 2005-2006, she was Curator of Contemporary Exhibitions at The Drawing Center after her work as Assistant Curator there. This follows her work at Dia Art Foundation (1999-2003), ArtsLink (1996-1997) and the National Endowment for the Arts (1991-1995). Carl taught art history and contemporary culture in the Department of Art at New York University (2002-3). She was curator of Flipside: ArtsLink at Artists
Space (2004) and go_HOME (2001), and is a founding member of School of Missing Studies.

Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss (SP/US) (School of Missing Studies) is an architect and founder of NAO (Normal Architecture Office) as well as founding member of the School of Missing Studies. His book /Almost Architecture/ published by Merz & Solitude and kuda.nao about architecture vis-`-vis emerging democratic processes is available through Vice Versa Vertrieb. Weiss has recently collaborated with Herzog & de Meuron architects and is currently faculty at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia as well as a PhD candidate at Goldsmiths College, London. He is currently in design process for Stadium Culture in collaboration with kuda.org: New Media Centre in Novi Sad to preserve public spaces left from socialist planning.

Nat Muller (NL) Is an independent curator and critic based in Rotterdam. She has held positions as staff curator at V2_, Institute
for Unstable Media (Rotterdam) and De Balie, Centre for Culture and Politics (Amsterdam). Her main interests include: the intersections of aesthetics, media and politics; (new) media and art in the Middle East. She recently co-edited the Mag.net Reader2: Between Paper and Pixel with Alessandro Ludovico (2007), and Mag.net Reader3: Processual Publlishing. Actual gestures. (forthcoming 2008). She is co-initiator of the Upgrade! Amsterdam. In 2008 she will spend a year at the Townhouse Gallery in Cairo as curator-in-residence.

John Haber (US) is a prolific American art critic who lives in New York. He uses the perspective of critical theory in an accessible, journalistic prose to write online reviews and essays about topics ranging from traditional Art History, Modernism and Postmodernism. When his New York Art Crit site started in 1994 with art reviews from around New York, it was the most thorough and extensive set of gallery and museumreviews anywhere online. This art hyperbook currently features about 700 artists, critics, and art historians from the early Renaissance to Postmodernism, with more than 5,000 links between reviews. Of special interest is the connection of art to feminism, philosophy, and politics.His essays on New Media bridge the interplay between science and art. Many of Haber s articles have also appeared in Artillery Magazine, Perfect 8, Artists Books Reviews, American Abstract Artists, and Sharkforum.

Moderated by Christina McPhee.