Kaufmann Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall
Free and open to the public
TIMOTHY MURRAY
Director of the Society for the Humanities,
Professor Comparative Literature and English, Cornell University
IMAGING SOUND IN NEW MEDIA ART:
ASIA ACOUSTICS, DISTRIBUTED
The lecture will propose a psycho-philosophical approach to international experiments in new media arts by reflecting on the contact zones of Asian sound art and their dialogue with European legacies of immateriality. An array of audiovisual examples will illustrate how the experimental importance of Asia Acoustics lies at the heart of any philosophical consideration (East or West) of current developments in imaging sound and its multimedia installation. Ranging from creative socio-cultural appropriations of "noise art," "the aesthetics of failure," and "distributed aesthetics," Asia Acoustics performs a shift away from the modernist remnants of humanist visions of subjectivity, cultural mysticism, and cinematic "projection" toward a rhizomatic model of the "folds" of intersubjective knowledge and cross-cultural archives. The deployment of the errancy of Asia Acoustics will be said to conjoin the artistic projects of Asia new media installations with the play of the electric data field.
Timothy Murray is the Director of The Society for the Humanities and Professor of Comparative Literature and English. His areas of research include new media, film and video, and visual studies, as well as seventeenth-century studies and literary theory, with strong interests in philosophy and psychoanalysis. He is the founding Curator of The Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art in the Cornell Library, the Co-Curator ofCTHEORY Multimedia, and he curated the traveling exhibition Contact Zones: The Art of CD-Rom. He is the author of Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds (2008); Zonas de contacto: el arte en CD-Rom (1999); Drama Trauma: Specters of Race and Sexuality in Performance, Video, Art (1997); Like a Film: Ideological Fantasy on Screen, Camera, and Canvas (1993); Theatrical Legitimation: Allegories of Genius in XVIIth-Century England and France (1987). He is editor ofMimesis, Masochism & Mime: The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought (1997) and, with Alan Smith, Repossessions: Psychoanalysis and the Phantasms of Early-Modern Culture (1997).
