11/19/06 11:45 AM
Bare life, subject, exposure, recuperation: ‘bare life’ on –empyre- soft-skinned space (Sydney, July 2006)A report(also known as THE THING because it was a monster to write!) by Christina McPhee, participant, documenta 12 magazine project for –empyre- soft-skinned space, Sydney; on the occasion of the documenta 12 transregional meeting on November 11 to 13, 2006, Goethe Institute, Cairo, Egypt.
What follows is a short essay describing the structure and content of our discussion on the online list serv, -empyre- soft-skinned space, in July 2006, surrounding the Documenta 12 leitmotif, “What is bare life?’ The discussion was organized, moderated and edited by the present writer / media artist with substantive contributions from invited guests to the forum, international artists and theorists working in the arena of networked performance, including Michele White (US), Connor McGarrigle (IR), Susana Mendes Silva (PT), Tina Gonsalves (AU), Hovagimyan (US). Theorist / artist Jordan Crandall (US) also contributed some texts at month’s end. The hypertext archive of the discussion is at https://mail.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2006-July/
A forthcoming PDF linear text version will be posted online with the documenta 12 magazine project internal site in early December 2006,
edited by Christina McPhee.
The increased intensity of global communication and simultaneity makes the challenge of trying to 'be' an individual subject -- whatever that is---continually more complex and overwhelming. - empyre-, if not implicated in this process, is still in the midst of it and perhaps may be, as our founder Melinda Rackham has called it , our 'soft-skinned space', a space of resistance as well, in that we can hope to generate -- on the fly--- acontemporary art and new media ethics in a public space we create for ourselves and others. In the March 2006 discussion, a lot of people were talking about an N space, past modernity and post modernity. Maybe that's where we're at now? In the N-space, bare life. The second question or'leitmotif' of Documenta 12 is described this way:" What is bare life? This second question underscores the sheer vulnerability and complete exposure of being. Bare life deals with that part of our existence from which no measure of security will ever protect us. But as in sexuality, absolute exposure is intricately connected with
infinite pleasure. There is an apocalyptic and obviously political dimension to bare life (brought out by torture and the concentration camp). There is, however, also a lyrical or even ecstatic dimension to its freedom for new and unexpected possibilities (in human relations as well as in our relationship to nature or, more generally, the world in which we live). Here and there, art dissolves the radical separation between painful subjection and joyous liberation. But what does that mean for its audiences?"
In developing this topic for the –empyre- list, my hope was to generate a new collaborative text from among a group of network based artists and theorists, towards certain tendencies within the question on ‘bare life.’ What are the practice implications for the artist or designer faced with the ethical issues of cultural production within the conditions of ‘bare life”? How does her intervention in sites of traumatic occurrence and recurrence, of traumatic memory, implicate an ethics of exposure, both for the artist and in the potentialities of such a place and its future? How to generate narrative at the liminal edge of what cannot be spoken of or imaged? How to do this in a way that occludes spectacle, and resists being commodified into the mass media flux? In the aftermath of disaster and loss, of political terror, even to the point of abandonment to death, how a person or a community, once having lost the control over the creation of its own identity, may recuperate the loss? As an artist, I have been particularly concerned with creating palimpsests of interpretive data that both trace the movements of a theme through a medium, while at the same time modeling that trace in formal structures that are conceptually expressive of the theme. In this respect, the –empyre- soft-skinned space seemed to me a condition or place of generative voicing around or near the condition of ‘bare life’ by choice and design. In my visual and sound art production I have been concerned with sustaining a layered performative engagement, using net art, video installation, performative drawing and digital photographic montage, within a site of continuing trauma and spontaneous memorial (“La Conchita mon amour” http://www.christinamcphee.net/la_conchita.html, ).I wanted to develop a discourse on –empyre- ‘s networked community list serv that might have the potential to create a dialectical field at the margins of a topology of trauma and absence. Six artists and theorists graciously agreed to participate based on their practices, all of which involved to some extent networked performance and emotive expression within a conceptual frame that provokes reflection about the poetics of the subject under conditions of displacement, traumatic residue, or even, as Roger Beurgel suggested, a lyrical and even ecstatic dimension. To this open process, I invited Michele White, a theorist at Tulane University New Orleans, queer theorist and author on performative identities on the web; and four network performance artists: Connor McGarrigle of Dublin, Susana Mendes Silva of Lisbon, Tina Gonsalves, an Australian currently based at University College London; and GH Hovagimyan, a New York based performance artist. Jordan Crandall, a theorist and video artist known for his project on the representation of violence (UNDERFIRE), was able to contribute a short essay at the end of the month.I did not specify, in my remit to the guests, that they focus on Agamben’s theory of ‘bare life’ although this was clearly a referent in the formulation of the question by Roger Buergel. I left open the opportunity interpretation so that they could decide how to respond to the
leitmotif, the only caveat being that they had to respond from the basis of their own practice insights primarily rather than relying on idées reçues even from Agamben. Each of the artists practices deploy the space of the net as a performance medium. The -empyre- space, though explicitly not performance space, would nonetheless register a text created by this group of people in a way that might have a performative presence, something like a virtual readers’ theatre. I felt it was especially critical to intensify the phenomenological sense of place on the list as a virtual spatial zone in which a dialectical engagement of ideas could occur from voices that might speak from inside testimony to their own practice. All are involved with performance art techniques, whether on the net, in live interactive installation, or in social activism. Each of them is very interested in emotional states and representations of identity within an electronically mediated social network, on the net or in live / electronic interfaces, whether in urban spaces, neural labs, in internet chat rooms, or the white cube of contemporary art. They each touch on the conditions of evacuation, or loss of the control of one's own identity formation and sense of place within the 'state of exception'. Together with many observers I have wondered about how the advent of global net-based communication throws up many a mirage in its wake, among them a sense of loss of individual identity; or a sense that the formation of one’s identity is both not inscribed in any social system anymore (i. e. it is completely open to free form play, or ecstasy. Susana Mendes Silva reported on how her performance work using mobile media interfaces indeed surprised her: the intensity of disturbing conditions of intimacy and speech arose from those situations “when I can promote or be in close relation with people,and I must confess that I find that as seductive as disturbing. In 2002 I made a performance via mobile phone called artphone. This happened during Free Manifesta (in Manifesta 4). There was a flyer and an online page with my personal mobile phone number and the sentence: "Don't be afraid to ask everything you always wanted to know about contemporary art". I received the calls and established a conversation (about an art issue) either with someone I knew or with someone I have never met before. In the version of 2005, presented at prog:me, I used skype phone and the visitors could talk to me directly from the exhibition space. Even though both experiences went quite well and it was not very difficult to overcome some shyness or awkwardness, every time I talked with a person it was a very intimate experience.”The flux of intimacy and fear within interlocative communications marks subjectivity with ‘seduction’ and exhilaration, alongside a loss of a sense of individual erosion of the Enlightenment mythos of, the idea of an individual ethical life. Roger Buergel queries an equivalence, "as in sexuality, [that] absolute exposure is intricately connected with infinite pleasure...a lyrical or even ecstatic dimension" ,asking if proximity to‘bare life’ might "dissolve the radical separation between painful subjection and joyous liberation?" Very early in the discussion on –empyre-,questions voiced over who is being exposed, and for whose pleasure, and in what way is ecstasy meant to be understood within a condition in which all subjectivity is constructed rather than essential. We considered "what it means when people decide or are forced to become visible in the world." But no one of us could do this from the 'outside', given the unstable and dynamic, temporal character of a hypertext in live development. All of the participants were plunged into a condition of scenario of conflict and response in which there could be no comfortable and empowered positions. The importance of a destabilized field allowed no one to assume a position of privileged voice based on presumed
gender or by contrast to appear as abject or silenced. What I did not anticipate was the arousal of a contested terrain wherein the introduction of queer theory with regard to the idea of ‘cultural
genitals,’ I e. the hypothesis that we may consider all gender markings as constructed identities, would lead to confrontation. Interestingly the confrontation was productive insofar as it destabilized the assumptions of gender and subject status from one guest to another within the entire group, not to mention the very attentive and actively posting readership. Just the ‘intrusion’ of the making-explicit of the constructed nature of –empyre’s- participatory space as a queer space made for a charged atmosphere in which the apparent desire for a more sustained and in depth
discourse was shared universally; as if the confrontation was a kind of lancement into a new level of uncertainty and concomitant bravery of speech. Some conflicted discourse arouse around how pleasures and pain of exposure are constituted through gender, race, and sexuality
positions. The list itself became a networked relational space insofar as some of the artist guests made inferences or assumptions about thegender or, to put it more harshly, 'cultural genitals' of their interlocutors; in so doing provoked, by mistake or design, a dynamic opening of the field so that everyone on the list was faced with an experience, perhaps even a performative or emotive one, that bordered on, or approached,'bare life,' because no one could establish a hegemonic voice by means of constructed status as (powerful) or (abject), (female) or (male) or any other binary. In this sense the –empyre- discussion produced an artistic event-scene that unfolds at the edge of the disappearance of subject
norms and the proximity of a kind of black hole of 'bare life' into which all voices are absorbed and occluded. I might almost say that -empyreitself became, a temporary, evanescent unfolding of this 'ecstatic' dimension. Readers on the list responded to the tension between the guests as an opportunity to seek greater depth of field in the dialectic, and one of them noted that the discussion had touched on a poetics of ‘bare life’ itself even as it struggled to identify a pathway or trace in proximity to it. Some of the most poignant writing came from one, Ana Valdes, an expatriate Argentinian activist living in Sweden, whose observations drew from her memories of surviving a prison camp for four years where she was imprisoned as a dissident. “I think the challenge to all of us is to
discover in all our individual situations the "border" between our conception of ourselves and the sheer existence,’ as Ana wrote. ‘What is bare life ? “ in the –empyre- soft-skinned space left open a kind of vulnerable space within which to query what constitutes subjectivity itself and its limits.As ‘bare life’ was not, on –empyre-, imaginatively confined to the reach for the incommensurate conditions of the camp, it became a metonym for the ways in which bodies are always already mediated by technology, and how the images of bodies bear ‘cultural genitals’ –constructions of aspects of gender on the basis of external markings or veilings. Common to both was consideration of a topology of ‘bare life’ as a place of disappearance or erasure and exposure and as a location of subjective (personal or human) erasure or exposure. Michele White developed an extended comment on exposure and veiling of gender especially in the social space of the net. “While gender and sex are supposed to be different, we often "see" real sex below the construed aspects of gender. Nevertheless, gender and sex identifications are usually based on readings and assumptions rather than proof and what would this proof be? ... Women performing many of the aspects of "man" indicate and provide a critique of how the role is produced. The confusion of identification is visceral when the eBay seller photoguyred describes an image as "Lesbian Antique Real Photograph Kissing" but then notes "Lesbian (?) two girls (?) kissing! On a boat with Teens type bathing suits. The more colorfully dressed person on left is of indeterminate gender as far as I can judge. Returnable if you can prove other than my title" (2006). These moments of failed identification, with the need for constant contextualizing question and exclamation marks, suggest that clothes make the man and the woman but that the genitals and shapes beneath these clothes can be complicated…the functioning of cultural genitals and the ways we read rather than know bodies is difficult to ignore.” Between the landscape and the body, the –empyre- text on ‘bare life’ moved along a narrow defile. Unveiled, exposed, evacuated: “What does it mean when people decide or are forced to become visible to the world?” Michele asked. If you engage in the imaging of the body and the landscape of trauma are you implicated as well in the forced exposure of the subject? The spectacularization of the site of trauma only turns to kitsch and to an evacuation of meaning. Mediatization of ongoing trauma only continues to place the construction of identity of place away from those who inhabit the disaster zone, who are, inaccessibly, in ‘bare life’. The loss of control of construction of identity creates an
evacuation as aftermath. Missing persons, missing location. How can the missing be found again ? How to recuperate back into the stream of commonality that might be thought of as human again? One reader, Sarah Kanouse, observed, “the apprehension of the potential for these various "forms-of-life" within the self is what allows for the possibility for communication and intellectual thought that is the political project of forging a common form-of-life that does not enforce unity through the expulsion of, for instance, those who have been expelled from New Orleans --to leave open this vulnerable space in the work itself so that 'others' , the audience, finds its 'various ''forms of life" ' inside the work.”Working within this level of psychological and political risk is a daunting experience, both with great highs and the many days of emptiness and
vulnerable awareness. If art forges a common form-of-life it is through the open work which itself is instantly subject to disintegration: its ephemerality though is powerful -- a moving target. Bare life cannot be imaged, but can it be acknowledged to take place in a slipstreaming flow sidereal to the flow of ‘ordinary’ time? A flow thatis somehow invisible, streaming next to, or just below, the surface of ordinary appearances and media spectacle? Michele: “I wonder if it is possible to exist without being recognized? What does existence mean when it is only negatively and cruelly constituted through torture and dismissal?” The situation recalls the ‘oubliette’, one of the old torture chambers of the Napoleonic era. Prisoners got thrown into an
underground cage. Then a door was locked over them. Then they were ‘oublié, forgotten. Nonetheless they continued to live. How can the
consideration of ‘bare life’ itself, as it were on the ‘outside’ of the oubliette, not fall into the trap of attempting to re-present what is inside the oubliette? ‘Bare life’, is always already in a condition of evacuation, or remove. Another reader, Mendi Obadake quoted Robert Pinsky’s "Poem of Disconnected Parts" (excerpted here). "At Robben Island the political prisoners studied/ They coined the motto Each one Teach one/ In Argentina the torturers demanded the prisoners /Address them always as 'Professor.'/ Many of my friends are moved by guilt, but I/ Am a creature of shame, I am ashamed to say./Culture the lock, culture the key." http://www.poetrymagazine.org/magazine/0206/poem_177610.html Mendi commented, “It seems to me that one purpose of art is to make sure that as long as culture is used as a lock, we can find a way to use
culture as a key.” Ana Valdez, another reader and herself a former political prisoner and torture victim from Argentina, asked of the difference between ‘existence’ and ‘life’ in the camps: “…Did we exist or did we only live? For me, and more clearly after these experience, to live is to be able to full participate in society, with all your rights, the right to exercise your citizenship and most important of all, the right to dissent. To me the right to dissent is the only one which is inalienable.” Art practice becomes an inflammatory speech against, the making invisible
of the individual subject. Several voices on –empyre- engaged the image of ‘homo sacer’ from Agamben. Most notably GH Hovagimyan wrote: “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 postions' of bare life and the sacred man are situated in this mediapolis. 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?” Might ‘bare life’ ‘s phenomenological presencing finds a cognate in traumatic memory, or memory of ‘bare life’? In conditions of sexual violence,double consciousness, of being both inside the horror of what is happening/has happened, and being able to absent yourself and to observe and document, brings about a condition in the spirit, from which you can create a landscape or topology of the trauma? Tina Gonsalves bore witness to her current practice developing emotion-triggering biofeedback video work with University College London neurologists, in such a way as to imply a completely fluid interface, or semi-permeable membrane, between the artifacts of digital visualization technology in the neural lab and the presencing of a real, possibly bare? life: “my work attempts to emancipate the diagnostic image, imagining how emotionally and individually designed images could potentially play a role in future healthcare, by inserting the ‘lived’ body into the image. Her strategies of recuperation presume some kind of real life back into an image and out again in an audience responsive feedback loop. ‘With “ Loss Series” 2002,” Tina wrote, “I began using my own emotions to create the work itself -- to attempt to translate the emotional interiority of the body. I then attempted to mimic the technique, using technology to monitor the audiences’ emotional body to drive the emotional narratives. I then began to use wireless and intimate wearable technologies as biofeedback devices, to allow better relationships with our own bodies; --looking at the role of art experiences to create healing.’” Consistently the –empyre- participants continued to search deeply for ways to create a new kind of recuperative space or functionality in the presence of or at the limn of ‘bare life’ conditions. In this, some of the artists connected this recuperative space with what the leitmotif calls “a lyrical and even ecstatic dimension.” The condition of vulnerability or exposure becomes a requisite for the unfolding of meaning, even an ethical dimension, to the work of art near ‘bare life’. Somehow becoming vulnerable, through the construction of a performative media interface, could create a condition of openness for the audience. To leave open this vulnerable space in the work itself so that 'others' , the audience, finds its 'various ''forms of life" ' inside the work of art. “There is another more optimistic aspect to Bare Life,” net artist Connor McGarrigle wrote., referring to “life directed toward the idea of happiness and cohesive with a form-of-life’ in which ‘the single ways, acts, and process of living are never simply facts but always and above all possibilities of
life….a radical rethinking of the potentiality of life, and life as potentiality.” He added,” I am interested in the idea that by focusing on simple everyday things like walking through a city, we begin a process which clarifies what we do and how we relate to our world and reveals greater truths about ways of being in the world. It is of necessity an open-ended process one for which the result is not clear. For me this ties in with this dimension of bare life the idea that stripping life down to its essentials opens up new and unexpected possibilities.”--Christina McPhee
New York City, November 19, 2006

Guests on –empyre- for July 2006 : “What is Bare Life?”
Tina Gonsalves integrates Art, Science and Technology. For over a decade she has used video, painting, animation and interactivity to explorecomplex emotional landscapes. Rich, painterly video abstractions create emotionally potent narratives that often seduce or repel the viewer.Converging science and art, she attempts to enrich the public understanding of the hidden emotional language of the body. Converging technology and video, she creates embodied interactive audiovisual experiences, discovering new ways of experiencing the internal body and the external environments. In 2002, Gonsalves pursued research to explore how her artwork could probe the audiences' emotional body. She investigated the use of biometric sensors as triggers for emotional video narratives, leading to both more immersive installations, as well as
intimate ubiquitous works. Gonsalves’ work in mobile and wearable technology investigates ways of using these technologies to creating new,more empathic social interactions. Her projects often attempt to disrupt codes of social behaviors, with an agenda to create more intimate and ‘authentic’ communication between each other (“ Medulla Intimata” , 2004; collaborator Tom Donaldson, “ Tryst“ 2006/2007).
Searching for more empirical foundations to the emotional cues that drive her work, she initiated a collaboration with affective neuroscientist,Dr. Hugo Critchley. With Dr. Crtichley, Gonsalves was awarded an AHRC/Ace arts and science fellowship. Currently, through her role asArtist in Resident at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, she is investigating the mechanisms through which emotions are triggered and shaped. Critchley and Gonsalves are discerning the physiological signatures of emotional states to create software and artwork that recognize and respond to internal emotions. Gonsalves work has been screened and exhibited extensively internationally including the Banff Centre for the Arts, Siggraph, USA; ISEA 2004; European Media Arts Festival 1997-2006; Artsway, UK; IAMAS, Japan; The Australian Centre For Photography, Sydney; Barbican,UK; Pompidou Centre, France; DEAF 2004, ICA, London and ACMI, Australia. http://www.tinagonsalves.com

Michele White is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Tulane University, New Orleans. She teaches Internet and new media studies, television and film theory, art history and contemporary visual culture, science fiction and technology literature, gender and queer theory, and critical race and postcolonial studies. In her new book, The Body and the Screen: Theories of Internet Spectatorship, White considers how spectatorial positions are produced and structured through such practices as interface design, digital imaging, net art, White poses hybrid critical models and suggests how theories of art viewing,authorship, feminist and psychoanalytic film, gender and queer studies, hypertext, photographic reproductions, television,and postcolonial and critical race studies offer ways to understand Internet sites and spectatorship. The critical models indicated in this book are intended to support ongoing new media research and production strategies. Her current research includes two book projects: Buy It Now: Lessons from Imaging eBay and Elements of the Internet: Rethinking the Network and Information Technology Workers. More information is available at http://www.michelwhite.org.

Conor McGarrigle is a net artist based in Dublin. He is the founder of online arts space Stunned.org . His art has dealt with themes of surveillance (Spook...) , identity (PLAY-lets) and art activism (IrishMuseumofModernArt.com), often involving fictional identities with an element of prankstavism never far away. He is currently working on an extended narrative work about artists in Dublin based on Joyce's Ulysses(Cyclops, Proteus episodes completed to date) and has recently developed an interest in mapping resulting in Google Bono : a google maps /surveillance camera mashup. His work has been widely exhibited internationally including the Seoul Net FEstival, File Sao Paolo, FILE RIO,Thailand New media arts festival, Fundacio La Caixa Barcelona, SIGGRAPH, ReJoyce Festival Dublin, Arthouse Dublin,Project Arts Centre Dublin, The City Arts Centre and Intermedia Cork. He is currently studying for an MFA at the National College of Art and Design Dublin.
http://www.stunned.org

G. H. Hovagimyan is an experimental cross media, new media and performance artist who lives and works in New York City. Born in 1950, he is one of the first artists in New York to start working in Internet Art, beginning in 1993, with such artist's online groups as the thing,ArtNetWeb, and Rhizome. From 1973 to 1986 GH was involved in the SoHo and Lower East Side underground art scene, showing conceptualworks at 112 Workshop in 1973. He worked with Gordon Matta-Clark on several projects, including. Days’ End, Conical Intersect, Walking Mans Arch, and Underground Explorations. Much of his early work is ephemeral in nature. Active in performance art, written and language works, GH used text conceptually in installation. His word piece, Tactics for Survival in the New Culture, was exhibited in "The Manifesto Show" (1979) organized by the artist collective Colab. This particular piece was to become the basis for one of his first online hypertext works in 1993. In
May,1994 he created a twenty billboard project for Creative Time, Hey Bozo … Use Mass Transit, widely publicized on television and in print media.His early internet based works, such as BKPC, Art Direct and, Faux Conceptual Art, converged conceptual practice with punk aesthetics on the net. His pioneering internet radio/TV talk show , Art Dirt, is part of the Walker Art Center's Digital StudiesArchives collection. Of his collaborative works with Peter Sinclair, the most well known are Soap opera for Laptops/ iMacs, Shooter and Rant/ Rant Back/ Back Rant.His new work involves mash-ups online with new art dirt radix at http://nujus.net/gh/ and http://post.thing.net/gh/ He is also active making HD rant video for pod cast and installation http://nujus.net/gh/html/rants.html

Susana Mendes Silva lives and works in Lisboa, Portugal. She has been working in the interstices of intimacy and affection, but also with reflecting about the object of art. Some of her projects make a very visible bridge between these two universes, especially the site- specific or the performance works. She has recently shown the installation Mind Walls in a group show at Museu da Cidade (Lisboa), and has developed the work Sheet for vector (the e-zine of virose http://www.virose.pt/) and for hidden agenda, contemporary art editions. Susana has spoken,this March (2006), about her networked performances - artphone, 2002; art_room, 2005; and artphone, 2005 - at The Upgrade! Lisbon. Her media art is found in festival venues and art databases internationally since 2002, including Free Manifesta, manifesta 4, Frankfurt, prog:me, Riode Janeiro, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art / Rhizome Artbase. In 2005 she presented the solo exhibitions Words in my mind (where she presented a drawing installation at Casa d'Os Dias da Água, Lisboa) and Life-cage (where she shown video and photographs at Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art, Lisboa), and in 2006 Did I hurt you? (where she presented video and drawings at Zoom, Galeria Carlos Carvalho Arte Contemporânea, Lisboa). Her video work was shown in the group screenings Mar Atlantico- Portuguese Video Art, FVNM, The School of the Art Institut Chicago and Del Zero al 2005, Fundação Marcelino Botín, Santander, Spain. This year it will be shown in Mostra de
Vídeo Arte Portuguesa Contemporânea - Antologia, Luanda, Angola http://www.turbulence.org/blog/index.html

Jordan Crandall (US) is a media artist and theorist. His ongoing art/research project, UNDERFIRE, concerning the organization and
representation of political violence, opens next October at the Seville Biennial. To date, two catalogues of Under Fire have been produced, in2004 and 2005, published by the Witte de With center for contemporary art, Rotterdam. The third volume will be produced by the Seville Biennial in early 2007. He is currently completing HOMEFRONT, a new 3-channel video installation that , which combines live-action video,surveillance footage, and military tracking software, and explores the effects of security culture on subjectivity and identity. His work has been presented in numerous solo exhibitions worldwide, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki; the Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum in Graz; ARTLAB in Tokyo; the Museo de Arte Carillo Gil in Mexico City; the Centre d’Art Contemporain de Basse- Normandie in Caen; the Kunst-Werke in Berlin; the Kitchen in New York; AGORA in Rio de Janeiro; the Edith Russ Site für Medienkunst in Oldenburg; and the TENT Centrum Beeldende Kunst in Rotterdam. His work has also been presented in group exhibitions at major institutions such as the Whitney Museum in New York. Crandall writes regularly on technology and culture. An anthology of his projects and critical writing -- entitled Drive -- was published by Hatje Cantz Verlag, in conjunction with Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM),
Karlshrue, in 2002. He is currently completing a body of writing on the culture of tracking, which looks at tracking as a technology, a discourse,and a perceptual modality. His most recent essay, "Precision+Guiding+Seeing" is online at CTHEORY (2006)
http://ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=502. He is Associate Professor in Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego.
http://jordancrandall.com/

Christina McPhee, a new media artist working in photography, video, net performance and drawing, interprets landscapes from an integration of data mediation with empirical observation, Her work also engages cyberfeminist questions of La Conchita, California is the site of McPhee’s new intensive multimedia site study, La Conchita mon amour,of the aftermath of a massive debris
flow in 2005. http://www.christinamcphee.net/la_conchita.html Christina McPhee’s installations have shown in 2006 at Sara Tecchia Roma New York (Chelsea) with “La Conchita mon Amour,” “Carrizo Diaries” on seismic memory, at the Cartes Centre for Art and Technology, Espoo (Helsinki), Finland, and Bildmuseet, Umea, Sweden; and in screening at the Pacific Film Archive for the centennial of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. She has recently created a five channel theatrical video for Pamela Z’s Wunderkabinet, a multimedia opera created in collaboration with Matt Brubeck and based on stories from the Museum of Jurassic Technology (Los Angeles), in debut at the LAB,San Francisco (2005) and for its Los Angeles premiere at the REDCAT Theatre, Walt Disney Music Hall in October 2006. Her writings onmedia theory and practice are published with Ctheory, Neural, and drunkenboat. Her media art is found in festival venues and museumsinternationally since 2000, including FILE Sao Paulo, prog:me Rio de Janeiro, Cybersonica at the ICA London Digital Arts and Culture Melbourne, and the Royal Academy Copenhagen. Cornell University Electronic Media Archives, the Pandora Archive at the National Library of Australia, the Whitney Museum of America Art Artport, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art / Rhizome Artbase.
http://christinamcphee.net http://strikeslip.tv, http://naxsm