with Tamara vukov

Ayesha Hameed is a new media artist, a Doctoral Candidate in the Graduate Programme in Social and Political Thought at York University and a former Board Member of Fuse Magazine. Her dissertation explores the imagery of the sea in discourses on modernity and the middle passage, and the work of artists Keith Piper, Yinka Shonibare and Isaac Julien. She has received fellowships to attend residencies at the School for Theory and Criticism at Cornell University and the Banff Centre for the Arts and is currently a Research Associate with Visible Cities, a research project conducted by Janine Marchessault under the Canada Research Chair in Art, Digital Media and Globalization at York University. She was recently the Artist-in-Residence at Studio XX in Montreal.

Her academic work has appeared in Fuse Magazine, an edited collection of essays called Culture and the State: Landscape & Ecology, a catalogue for the exhibition for “Charlie Don’t Surf” at the Centre A Gallery (Vancouver) and one of her collaborative projects is forthcoming in West Coast Line.

Abstract

Notes on the Politics of New Media Engagement

Initiating a conversation at the Digital Poetics and Politics Summer Institute in August of 2004, Ayesha Hameed and Tamara Vukov began an exchange that has built over the past fifteen months through face to face discussion, e-mail, and other digital forms on the possibilities, challenges and obstacles we face as two scholar/artists attempting to do theoretical and creative work across a range of media forms (textual, aural, visual) in a manner that the rubric of “new media” now allows. We recognized in each other’s earlier projects (Ayesha’s sea/myth build (http://www.students.yorku.ca/~ayesha/htm/portfolio.htm) and Tamara’s Balkan Mediations (http://www.pomgrenade.org/) attempts to experiment with and bridge the divide between textual/theoretical and visual/aural/multimedia modes, while also resisting the pitfalls and utopian hype of new media neoliberalism. We have pursued the conversation across oral and digital forms, touching on everything from formal concerns and reception to copyleft and collaborative writing practices, reshaping, cutting and pasting fragments, and rendering it into the current piece that preserves the ephemeral and fragmentary form of our conversations for this digital issue of Public.