Re: <nettime> RIP Steven Kurtz

[Eric Kluitenberg via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Dear nettimers,

The moment when someone close and dear passes away is always a confrontation with mortality. Something, I guess, most of us banish from our minds. Steve was both a hugely inspirational figure to me (and many many others as is already apparent from Geert’s, David’s, and Andreas’s posts here), and an uncommonly nice, sympathetic person. So, I’m shocked and saddened by his passing and somewhat at a loss for proper words.

There are so many things to mention: CAE’s seminal understanding of the Data Body - the total collection of files connected to your existence, and how that is more real to ‘officialdom’ than your biological body. 

His pioneering with CAE of participatory performances that introduced the politics of biotechnology to a much wider audience and allowed them to get a first hand, demystified, experience.

As Andreas mentioned, in 2004 he became the object of an overzealous prosecutor, following the death of his wife Hope. It brought a big collection of artists, curators, theorists / critics together to protest this absurd and painful four year ordeal in the CAE Defense Fund <http://www.tacticalmediafiles.net/campaigns/6412>. Steve somehow managed to get through that period, standing his ground, but the scientist he had worked with, Robert Ferell, caved in, settled with the prosecutors and passed away shortly after, dying of cancer - a condition certainly exacerbated by this groundless prosecution.

In the CAE book Digital Resistance Steve and his collective celebrated the figure of the amateur in such contested knowledge spaces. The amateur who is not invested in funding and reputation hierarchies, who is not delimited by a particular disciplinary domain, who is motivated only by ‘love’ of their subject, as the latin root of the word Amateur already indicates. This notion to me is indispensable in thinking and actualising critical knowledge practices outside of the sanctified confines of academia.

And we're just scraping the surface here..

We lost, I lost, a dear friend, but there is so much he and CAE left behind for all of us, for coming generations in particular to draw upon. We can be eternally thankful to him and his fellow travellers for that.

Onward indeed Steve!

-eric 
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