aesthesis – an unelaborated elementary awareness of stimulation; “a sensation of touch”
esthesis – sensation, sense datum, sense experience, sense impression
perception – the process of perceiving

limen, threshold – the smallest detectable sensation

masking – the blocking of one sensation resulting from the presence of another sensation; “he studied auditory masking by pure tones”

visual sensation, vision – the perceptual experience of seeing; “the runners emerged from the trees into his clear vision”; “he had a visual sensation of intense light”

odour, olfactory perception, olfactory sensation, smell, odor – the sensation that results when olfactory receptors in the nose are stimulated by particular chemicals in gaseous form; “she loved the smell of roses”

gustatory perception, gustatory sensation, taste, taste perception, taste sensation – the sensation that results when taste buds in the tongue and throat convey information about the chemical composition of a soluble stimulus; “the candy left him with a bad taste“; “the melon had a delicious taste”

auditory sensation, sound – the subjective sensation of hearing something; “he strained to hear the faint sounds”

synaesthesia, synesthesia – a sensation that normally occurs in one sense modality occurs when another modality is stimulated

Since the eighteenth century, in Europe, the meaning of the word became associated with  “the sensation of the beautiful” and with artistic labor. Art and sensation of the beautiful became synonymous.

From the perspective of the colonies, both concepts and practices were on the one hand alien and on the other hand were instruments for the management of subjectivity (e.g., coloniality of being). These “feelings” never died and today they are erupting in both artistic expressions and in art/literary criticism and history.

With the participation of:

Michaeline A. Crichlow, African and African-American Studies & Sociology

Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities and School of Law,
Birkbeck College, University of London (UK); founder and former Director
Instituto de Estudios Sociales y Culturales, Universidad Javeriana, Bogota

Commentaries by:

Roberto Dainotto, Romance Studies and Program in Literature,
Duke University (author of Europe (in Theory), Duke University Press, 2007)

Francisco-J. Hernández Adrián, Romance Studies, Duke University
(author of on Tropical Grounds: Insularity and the Avant-Gardes in the Caribbean and the Canary Islands forthcoming)

On this particular occasion, Michaeline A. Crichlow will focus her presentation around her recently published book Globalization and the Post’Creole Imagination: Notes on Fleeing the Plantation (Duke University Press, 2009).

Oscar Guardiola-Rivera who recently published Being Against the World: Rebellion and Constitution (Birkbeck Law Press, 2009), will address the re-configuration of (certain) European Left, based on a recent important conference at Birkbeck College in March 2009 (”On the Idea of Communism,” http://www.bbk.ac.uk/bih/activities/ideaofcommunism).

For accessing Professor Michaeline A. Chrichlow and Oscar Guardiola-Rivera’s articles
please contact: tracy.carhart@duke.edu

(Light dinner will be served)

I. Net-geo-politics

“The development of communication has run hand in hand with the processes of globalization, due to the need to communicate across distance and geographic barriers,” asserts Sally Burch in the essay that begins this section.  Communication maps modernity’s time-spaces, producing presences and absences. These function as nodes in networks of power, in the midst of ongoing flux across digital and non-digital realms. These essays and artworks elucidate how the terms of engagement are being defined, the borders being constructed or crossed, as discursive arrangements of the digital world are contested and refigured.

THE CHALLENGE OF DEVELOPING A SOCIAL AGENDA IN COMMUNICATION
Sally BURCH

In this essay, originally delivered at the World Social Forum in 2003, Sally Burch offers an analysis of the contemporary global landscape of communications.  She argues that a social agenda for “that Other Possible World” requires pressure on communication industries regarding form, content and infrastructure, as well as developing alternative and community media programs.  Also, she urges activist groups to become involved in public policy and global campaigns for democratizing communication.  Sally Burch is the Executive Director of the Agencia Latinoamericana de Información (ALAI), based in Quito, Ecuador.

LOW DRONE
Angel NEVAREZ and Alex RIVERA

The transnational movement of digital information has been widely lauded as one of its most emancipatory contributions. The material and juridical limits of this capacity, as well as the possibility of its symbolic insurgency, are suggested by this piece. This Internet artwork by artists and filmmakers Alex Rivera and Angel Nevarez is centered on an airborne, remote control “low-rider” equipped with video cameras. It flies over the US/Mexico border and sends a live feed to the viewer/user. The flight traverses spiritual, geo-political and technological borderlands. Rivera and Nevarez work in these and other borderlands of new media, independent film and U.S. Latinidad.

DEVELOPMENTALISM REDUX?
Ravi SUNDARAM

This essay narrates the political and cultural meanings of what Sundaram terms “developmentalism 2” – that is, the contemporary reinvigoration and refurbishing of mid-20th century developmentalist discourse in the guise of ICT4D (Information Communication Technology for Development). In the context of India, this makes a particular kind of historical and discursive sense, but the phenomenon is also easily recognizable across the “developing world.” Sundaram is a Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi. He is also one of the initiators of Sarai, which is a “space for research, practice and conversation about the contemporary media and urban constellations.” This article was originally delivered at the Incommunicado 05  conference and published in Lovink, G. and Soehle, Z., Eds. The Incommunicado Reader: Information for Everybody Else. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures (2005).

Section II: Re-Mapping Networks

Section III: An/Other Digital World

III.  An/Other Digital World

Situated along variegated routes of contemporary “information societies,” the work of the artists and scholars included in this section constitute entangled sites of aesthetic, political, and economic arrangements across a range of digital media and Internet practices. These practices reconstruct relations of power in and through global media, and refigure the boundaries of that power, trespassing digital spaces or creating other spaces. They question normative codes, policies, and archives of the digital, while positing, and inhabiting, multiple digital worlds. These works contribute, as do all works in this dossier, to an/other digital thinking.

CCINDEX
contemporary culture index

The contemporary culture index is an independent archive that emphasizes the trans-disciplinary and transnational aggregation of art and scholarship. It initiates new categories of thought and orders of meaning while making available works that are otherwise not considered to be in conversation, thereby creating the possibility for collective thought built upon seemingly disparate sources. Contemporary culture index is a transnational activist media and scholarship collective.

I.MIRROR, PART 1
China TRACY (Cao Fei)

In this video, the melancholic edge of absolute freedom in the new digital cities of Second Life is shared, for mutual suffering or ambivalent celebration. Under the revolving sign of the almighty dollar, the avatar is adrift in digital cities, oddly vacant. She invites us to sing with her. The video (10 min., 2007) is part one of a three-part Second Life documentary produced for the China Tracy Pavilion Project, China Pavilion, 52nd Venice Biennale 2007. Cao Fei is an artist based in Beijing, China.

INTERCEPTING HETEROPATRIARCHY COLONIAL NORMATIVE: LATIN@ QUEER MEDIA ARTISTS AND THEIR WORKS (A WORK IN PROGRESS)
Raúl Moarquech FERRERA-BALANQUET

This html essay and catalogue, which includes images and an extensive list of titles of recent videos by the author and other artists, reflects on episodes from the histories of U.S. Latina/o and Latin American Queer Video Art. Raúl Moarquech Ferrera-Balanquet is a central figure in these histories, having been involved as a curator, video artist and new media scholar since the 1980’s. He is based in Merida, Mexico and is founder of the annual new media festival and institute, “Interactiva.” Please note that this website was designed specifically for this dossier.

THE NETWORK OF NO_DES
RAQS MEDIA COLLECTIVE

“The Network of No-des” is an html based audio and visual work that begins with the multi-valences of a news story about an incident of so-called digital “piracy” in contemporary India. The piece proceeds through a nodal structure in which “it becomes impossible to suppress or kill an idea.” As the RAQS Media Collective explains in their introduction to the work, it  “uses driftwood from web searches, messages in data bottles, re-mixed fragments of Hindi and Bengali film scenes and research notes from Sarai’s ongoing exploration of new media street culture in Delhi to present an array of associational possibilities.” The piece was produced at the Sarai Media Lab, New Delhi, in collaboration with Mrityunjay Chatterjee and Iram Ghufran, by the Raqs Media Collective (Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta and Jeebesh Bagchi).

DECOLONIZING THE TECHNOLOGIES OF KNOWLEDGE: VIDEO AND INDIGENOUS EPISTEMOLOGY
Freya SCHIWY

In this article, Schiwy grapples with the problems of decolonizing thinking about indigenous video through an engagement with recent videos of the Andean region. These videos suggest that we must decolonize the aesthetic norms that have heretofore been defined as decolonial aesthetics. Schiwy radically re-opens the questions of the politics of representation, insisting on understanding the contingency and fluidity of the “techne” and “techné” – the apparatus itself and the uses that the apparatus are put to – in indigenous media. Freya Schiwy is Assistant Professor of Latin American Media and Cultural Studies in the Media and Cultural Studies Department and Vice-Chair of the Latin American Studies Program at the University of California-Riverside. This article is translated from the Spanish, and was originally published as “Descolonizar las tecnologías del conocimiento:  Video y epistemología indígena” in Walsh, C., Ed. Estudios Culturales Latinoamericanos: Retos Desde y Sobre La Región Andina. Quito, Ecuador: Universidad Andina Simon Bolivar and Ediciones Abya Yala (2003).

Section I: Net-geo-politics

Section II: Re-mapping Networks

II. Re-mapping Networks

How are networks of cultural memories and political practices being digitally re-mapped? These works interrogate the contemporary political geography of the digital, including its historical and geo-political antecedents. As they examine the consequences of routes of commerce and cultural exchange, they position themselves amongst a different set of coordinates. Technologies of transportation and travel become densely laden with colonial trajectories of meaning. These are re-routed through analytical, visual and autobiographical tellings.

CODE: SURVEY

Renée GREEN and FREE AGENT MEDIA

This piece mobilizes the notion of the “grid” to manifest intertwining histories of communication, capitalist expansion and social transformation. In the piece, which is both an Internet artwork and site-specific media installation at the Caltrans (California State Transportation Department) headquarters in Los Angeles, “transportation” becomes an index for histories of local and global routes and their archives of visual, cultural, political and spiritual cargo. Renée Green is an artist, filmmaker and writer. She is Dean of Graduate Studies at the San Francisco Art Institute.

MEMORIAS DEL HIJO DEL VIEJO

Enrique CASTRO-RIOS

Memorias, Part 2 (Video)

Memorias, Part 3 (Video)

Through a video artwork (in three parts) that operates across visual codes and cinematic genres, the artist traces intersecting histories of his life, his family, U.S. imperialism, the Panama Canal, and the invasion of 1989. The multiple narrative threads evoke the prismatic legacies of the colonial, cinematic panoramas of the canal, now told from their other side. The Panama Canal is, like all modern technologies, simultaneously a transit route, a route of commodity exchange, and a route of communication. It is both an image and a carrier of images, the sign and signified. Enrique Castro-Ríos is an artist and scholar based in Panamá.

TALKING RACE AND CYBERSPACE, AN INTERVIEW WITH LISA NAKAMURA

Geert LOVINK

In this conversation, two transnational scholars working in the ever-nascent field(s) of new media theory discuss the importance of inter- and trans-disciplinary inquiry into questions of race, gender and geo-politics in and through the Internet. Included is an analysis of why this discussion has been so sparse, and how it might be further seeded. The conversation provides a conceptual link between media theory and racialization, as well as the intersection of geo-politics in both, and suggests some nodal points amongst diverse thinkers and practitioners of global media interventions. Geert Lovink is Associate Professor and founding Director of the Institute of Network Cultures at the University of Amsterdam. Lisa Nakamura is the Director of the Asian American Studies Program, Professor in the Institute of Communication Research and Media Studies Program and Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign.

THE DISCURSIVE CONSTRUCTION OF “WOMEN” IN LAS AMERICAS: AN ANALYSIS OF SIXTEENTH-CENTURY PRINT CULTURE

Daphne TAYLOR-GARCIA

Daphne Taylor-García performs a decolonial reading of key moments in the discursive construction/destruction of indigenous women, which occurs at the conjuncture of the “discovery” of the Americas and the rise of the printing press. Early mass produced images of indigenous peoples are one moment of a powerful discursive operation. These representations of indigenous gender frame the “Indian” in relation to his/her refusal to perform colonial constructions of gender.  Daphne Taylor-García is the President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California – Santa Barbara.  Please note that this website was designed specifically for this dossier.

Section I: Net-geo-politics

Section III: An/other Digital World

For more information, visit the course website.

This course will begin with a historical overview of social and civil conflict in Europe leading to the formation of laws and antidiscrimination legislation within the EU. We will look specifically at anti-discrimination laws as they have arisen in various European countries; comparing the history of regulation and management of race and ethnic relations and the discourse surrounding the concept of Blackness and self-identification. Historically, social forces within Europe have given rise to policies to combat racism. We will trace the chain of events following social and civil conflicts that prompted these policies and analyze the legislative and intellectual discourse produced in the aftermath.

In the second week, we will explore the notions of blackness as; an official categorization; as a social construction, employed by natives to indicate (non) belonging; as a Diaspora living within Europe; and as a contestation of the dominant (White) paradigm. We will focus on the historical and colonial legacies of European countries to discuss the origins of Black Europe and investigate the impact of these legacies on policies and legislation.

This course will also seek to address the dimensions of race and ethnic relations that are unique to Europe; examining the ways in which conceptions of the “other” are institutionalized and reproduced; the rise of xenophobia in various EU countries; the legal definitions and discourse surrounding the conceptualized “other”; and examining the ways in which each country has dealt with issues of race and national identity.

For more information, visit the course website.

Dossier Contents

1) Introduction by Dalida María Benfield

2) Reprints

Nakamura, Lisa. (2002). ““Where Do You Want to Go Today?”: Cybernetic Tourism, the Internet, and Transnationality.” In Nakamura, L. Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet. New York: Routledge.

Sundaram, Ravi. (2005). “Developmentalism Redux?” In Lovink, G. and Soehle, Z., Eds. The Incommunicado Reader: Information for Everybody Else. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures.

Schiwy, Freya. (2003). “Descolonizar las tecnologías del conocimiento.” In Walsh, C., Ed. Estudios Culturales Latinoamericanos retos desde y sobre la region andina. pp. 304 – 313.

3) Commissioned Interactive Visual/Text Works:

Taylor-Garcia, Daphne. This piece, title in progress, will be based on visual readings of 16th century representations of indigenous gender from her recently filed dissertation at UC-Berkeley, “Theorizing “The Americas”: Sexuality, Sociogeny and Print Capital in the Long Sixteenth Century.” Daphne is a current President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California – Santa Barbara.

Ferrera-Balanquet, Raúl. “Latina/o Video Queer.” A visual narrative of the history of U.S. Latina/o and Latin American Queer Video Art. Raul
Ferrera-Balanquet is video artist and new media scholar. He is based in Merida, Mexico and is founder of the new media festival and institute, “Interactiva,” held annually at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Merida.

4) Existing Internet-based Artworks:

“Low Drone.” Internet artwork by Alex Rivera, http://lowdrone.com/drone-live1.html. “Low Drone” is a flying low-rider equipped with video cameras that flies over the US/Mexico border and sends a live feed to the viewer/user via the website. Alex Rivera is one of the most prominent U.S. Latino filmmakers/new media artists working today. His recent feature film, The Sleepdealer, won two awards at the Sundance Film Festival, 2008.

“The Network of No_des.” Internet artwork by the Raqs Media Collective, http://www.raqsmediacollective.net/nodes.html. “The Network of No-des” is an interactive text/image/audio work that investigates issues of digital piracy and intellectual property in contemporary India. The Raqs Media Collective is an internationally recognized artists collective whose work is centered on digital cultures and post-coloniality.

“Code:Survey.” Renée Green. This is an interactive text/image/audio work commissioned by CalTrans, the California State Transportation Department, that mobilizes a montaged grid of intertwining histories of communication, transportation and capitalist expansion.

5) Video Footage (Youtube) :

“Memorias del Hijo del Viejo.” 28 minutes, 2001, Enrique Castro-Rios. This video traces intersecting histories of the artist’s family and the
Panama Canal. Enrique Castro-Ríos is an artist and scholar based in Panamá.

“i.Mirror. Part 1.” 10 minutes, 2008, by China Tracy (Cao Fei). This video documents the adventures of the artist’s avatar, “China Tracy,” across the time-spaces of the Second Life website. Cao Fei is an artist based in Guangzhou, China, whose recent work was featured at the 2007 Venice Biennale, Chinese Pavilion.

Historically, Enlightenment ideas, which have been traditionally cast as the originator of emancipation movements on a worldwide scale, have been compromised by their implication in colonization, slavery, slave trading and the emergence and intensification of Western racism. Since the Middle Passage, various forms of Black knowledge have provided vantage points for reading transatlantic histories and cultures in an alternative light: to look at the modern world through lessons from Haiti, the Black Seminoles, or the quilombo of Palmares, instead of primarily through the ideas of Voltaire or Hegel opens up different ways of conceptualizing knowledge, humanism, freedom and civil rights.

The Eighth Biennial Conference of the Collegium of African American Research (CAAR) in Bremen, Germany, March 25 – 29, 2009 explores the global epistemological, political, literary, and cultural impact of the many forms of African American diasporic knowledges and struggles and their enduring transnational manifestations. Underscoring the ubiquity of the crossfertilization of Black knowledge and Black struggles in a larger global arena, the conference will consider the various connections forged through production of knowledge, like the long lasting effects of African American movements for Civil Rights on Black cultural production, and on transatlantic social movements, literatures and cultures in general. It will illuminate this nexus in all its incarnations—abolition, feminisms/womanism, working-class struggles, anti-colonial movements and the peace movements, among others—and conduits, like the African American agents, historical and literary texts, visual culture and diverse institutions that have forged and articulated these connections.

Recognizing that African American diasporic interactions historically have expanded to include the Indian subcontinent, and, more recently, to reach other Asian countries like Japan and China, mainly through the spread of Black popular culture, the conference will extend its focus beyond a rigidly defined Atlantic milieu. As a forum for much needed dialogues/interactions between various disciplines and national and continental affiliations, this CAAR conference encourages contributions that would stimulate collaboration and exchanges between Black European Studies and African American Studies, and between African American Studies and a range of other disciplines on an international scale.

Viewing African American Studies as a global discipline, we invite proposals for panels, workshops and papers that address the diverse kinds of mutual recognition, negotiation and coalition-building of global African American agency, as well as antagonistic encounters borne by racism, class structures and misogyny. In order to counter both the backlash against multiculturalism and civil rights in the US and the recent reconfiguration of Europe as a fortress of the West against so called invasion from the South and East, many telling cases in point might be addressed. The symptomatic discourses around Katrina and Jena, or the debates around the current tragedy of illegal, and lethal mass African migration to Europe’s South figure here in only exemplary fashion.

Visit the conference website »

Speakers

• Robert Fine (Warwick) author of ‘Cosmopolitanism’
• Paul Gilroy (LSE) author of ‘After Empire’
• Martti Koskenniemi (Helsinki & Cambridge) author of ‘The Gentle
  Civiliser of Nations’
• Walter Mignolo (Duke) author of ‘The Idea of Latin America’
• David Kennedy (Brown & Harvard) author of ‘The Dark Side of
  Virtue’
• Costas Douzinas (Birkbeck) author of ‘Human Rights and Empire’

In collaboration with the The Leverhulme Trust Project: Between Cosmopolitanism and Empire: Europe, Human Rights, Sovereignty.

Free – no registration – all welcome. For more information contact Julia Eisner j.eisner@bbk.ac.uk