[Air-l] Neural Skeins and Digital Skins -- November on -empyre-

[Michael Arnold-Mages]

The parallels between the internet and a biological system are many.
Growth and decay, circulation and disease are symptoms of these living
systems.  In our bodies, cells, neurons, bacteria and on-line, words,
memes and code-structures are vital elements of ordered, yet chaotic
process. For the month of November -empyre- delights in presenting Neural
Skeins and Digital Skins:  code, writing, and the net as a central nervous
system, with four prominent artists and theorists.

***

In a pastiche of imagery and French and English text, Tamara Lai (Belgium)
spins her intimate, visceral cyber-poems from her base in Liege.  Lai's
oeuvre includes exploration of performance, ephemerality and virtual
relations.

Alan Sondheim (US), New York based  net artist and poet, conducts a
continuous meditation on cyberspace, emphasizing issues of interiority,
subjectivity, body, and language.
http://www.asondheim.org/

Alessandro Ludovico (IT) publishes the critical journal neural.it in
Italian and English online.  <http://www.neural.it> and
<http://www.neural.it/english>

Florian Cramer (Germany), is a theorist on comparative net aesthetics and
literature, and lectures at the Free University Berlin.

***

As Alan writes, We collude between death and sex, to the limits of
distortion - space-time burns around configurations of terror and the
body.

The skin is always a skein of communication. Words are performative only
to the extent they can persuade physical reality beyond the sememe -
propaganda or persuasion of language.

How, as Florian asks, does 'codework'  fit notions of text that were
crafted without digital code - most importantly: machine-executable
digital code - in mind, and vice versa. Is it a coincidence that, in their
poetical appropriation of low-level Internet codes, codeworks ended up
aesthetically resembling concrete poetry? And, apart from aesthetic
resemblances, how do computer programs relate to literature?

Join us in discussion to examine these questions and more on -empyre-.

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http://www.subtle.net/empyre
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