Please donate and help me spread the word!!! We have 15 days to raise $5000

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/163496660/local-autonomy-networks-find-each-other

Local Autonomy Networks (Autonets) is a line of mesh networked electronic clothing with the goal of building autonomous local networks that don’t rely on corporate infrastructure to function, inspired by community based, anti-racist, prison abolitionist responses to gendered violence. The project is focused on creating networks of communication to increase community autonomy and reduce violence against women, LGBTQI people, people of color and other groups who continue to survive violence on a daily basis. The Autonets garments, when activated, will alert everyone in range of the the local mesh network who is wearing another autonet garment that someone needs help and will indicate that person’s direction and distance.

Local Autonomy Networks: Find Each Other is a collaboration between Micha Cárdenas, PhD student in Media Arts and Practice at the University of Southern California, Allison Wyper, Master of Fine Arts in Dance from Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, UCLA, Natalie Rosen and Claire Viele. We need funding to support the production of 12 Autonets garments and the presentation of performances and workshops at the Allied Media Conference in Detroit, MI, the International Symposium of Electronic Art in Albuquerque, NM, the HTMlles festival of feminist new media art in Montreal, QC and the American Studies Association annual meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The project has been invited to all of these venues, but none of them are able to provide funding for travel of materials to produce the electronics for future performances. The video above uses two early prototypes, but the actual Autonets garments are still in development. The devices will be made open source under an Open Hardware license and the designs will be made publicly available. We hope to be able to give working devices to people who need them through workshops once we feel they are working well enough to be distributed.

Please donate and help me spread the word!!! We have 15 days to raise $5000

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/163496660/local-autonomy-networks-find-each-other

Artist/Theorist Micha Cárdenas will be speaking at TEDx Del Mar on April 29th. The theme of TEDx Del Mar 2012 is Envisioning Transhumanity. More info available at http://www.tedxdelmar.com/ .

About

A Transhuman studies conference on the future of our minds, bodies and societies, Sunday, 4/29/12 @ UCSD.

Description

We will discuss the potential promise and peril of coming technologies that will augment and radically transform our minds, bodies, and cultures. Many see these transformations as inevitable outcomes of accelerating technological development and global market conditions. The purpose of this conference is to emphasize Transhuman studies as an academic discipline, as well as establish a local community of students, scholars and entrepreneurs with the raised-consciousness and ambition to have a positive impact on our future.

We aim to discuss the following topics in a manner rigorous enough to satisfy university-educated scholars, but not so technical as to alienate the many people that are new to the subject matter:

Near and Far Cyborg World: What are the potential ramifications of visor cellphones and augmented reality, or the intimate cyborg interfaces developing across biotech, as well as in-silico life? What kinds of privacy rules should govern cellphone visors? Can there be limits preventing users from transforming the appearance of others? How are children to be safely hybridized with cyborg technologies? How will the increasing elderly react to cyborg technologies? What risks or better forms of life arise if individuality blurs when populations of cyborgs interconnect?

Current and Future Life-Enhancement: How effective is life-logging? How good are the best happiness, intelligence and fitness improvement apps and devices? What is the current state and prospects for physical and mental health enhancement technologies? What are the short term prospects for developing human potential and improving quality of life in San Diego for all groups, especially the worst-off?

Ethics, Economics, and Culture: What sociocultural and economic ramifications will transhumanist values have in the world, as well as transhuman technologies? Barring the destruction of civilization, is transhumanity inevitable?

The Market and Transhuman interests: To what degree do the market forces driving transhumanity diverge from the ends we ought to desire? What are the transhuman goals? How can we guide these transformations to optimize well being and freedom?

What is the Potential Impact of Accelerated Consciousness Raising?: How will we be changed by the explosion of knowledge and intelligence distributed between and within human minds?

Bio-Conservative Views: Are there bio-conservative arguments that haven’t been well-considered? What are the strongest arguments against human augmentation? Are there practical programs to prevent it?

Foresight in Augmentation: What’s next? Will there be a general order of development for human enhancement technologies? What are the technical limits of augmentation? What are the limits and prospects for cognitive, emotive, and empathetic augmentation?

Aging as Pathology: To what degree is it appropriate to treat aging as a single pathology? What are the prospects for life-extension, the costs, the availability, the state of the science of gene-therapy and pre-natal anti-aging interventions?

About TEDx, x = independently organized event

In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized. (Subject to certain rules and regulations.)

About TED
TED is a nonprofit organization devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. Started as a four-day conference in California 26 years ago, TED has grown to support those world-changing ideas with multiple initiatives. At TED, the world’s leading thinkers and doers are asked to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. Talks are then made available, free, at TED.com. TED speakers have included Bill Gates, Jane Goodall, Elizabeth Gilbert, Sir Richard Branson, Benoit Mandelbrot, Philippe Starck, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Isabel Allende and former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Two major TED events are held each year: The TED Conference takes place every spring in Long Beach, California (along with a parallel conference, TEDActive, in Palm Springs), and TEDGlobal is held each summer in Edinburgh, Scotland.

TED’s media initiatives include TED.com, where new TEDTalks are posted daily; the new TED Conversations, enabling broad conversations among TED fans; and the Open Translation Project, which provides subtitles and interactive transcripts as well as the ability for any TEDTalk to be translated by volunteers worldwide.

TED has established the annual TED Prize, where exceptional individuals with a wish to change the world are given the opportunity to put their wishes into action; TEDx, which offers individuals or groups a way to host local, self-organized events around the world; and the TED Fellows program, helping world-changing innovators from around the globe to become part of the TED community and, with its help, amplify the impact of their remarkable projects and activities.

For information about TED’s upcoming conferences, visit http://www.ted.com/registration

Follow TED on Twitter at http://twitter.com/TEDTalks, or on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/TED

Highways Performance Space@ 18th St. Arts Center 1651 18th Street|Santa Monica, CA 904041/2 block north of Olympic Blvd.
friday + saturday APRIL 20+21, 2012 at 8:30pm
——————————————
highways performance space + lambda literary present

WANDERLUST
curated by raquel gutiérrez
writers of latino/a and queer extractions
make the specter of place known through
word, as they shepherd us in and guide us
through radical spatial narratives that weave
in tales of sexualized citizenry, gendered
candor and transnational desires.
—————————————
WITH

CHARLES RICE-GONZALEZ (April 21 only)
SUSANA COOK
MARCELA FUENTES
RAFA ESPARZA + LUIS FLORES
FRANK GALARTE
MICHA CARDENAS
RAQUEL GUTIERREZ

Charles Rice-González, born in Puerto Rico and reared in the Bronx, is a writer, long-time community and LGBT activist and Executive Director of BAAD! The Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance. He received a B.A. in Communications from Adelphi University and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Goddard College. His debut novel, Chulito, was released in October 2011, and he co-edited, with Charlie Vázquez, From Macho to Mariposa: New Gay Latino Fiction released in August 2011. He is also an award-winning playwright and serves on the boards of the Bronx Council on the Arts and the National Association of Latino Art and Cultures.
—

Born in Argentina, Susana Cook is a New York based playwright, director and performer who has been presenting innovative works internationally for over 20 years.

She has performed in Spain, France, India, Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador, Canada and at several colleges and universities around the country.

Some of her latest shows are : The Homophobes, a clown show, The Fury of The Gods, Homeland Insecurities, The idiot King, The Values Horror Show, 100 Years of Attitude, Dykenstein, Hamletango, Prince of Butches, Gross National Product, Hot Tamale, Conga Guerrilla Forest, The Fraud, Butch Fashion Show in the Femme Auto Body Shop, Rats and Tango Lesbiango.

She is the recipient of several fellowships and awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Arts International, Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, The Franklin Furnace Archives, The Puffin Foundation and INTAR.
–
Rafael Esparza is a multidisciplinary artist living and working out of Los Angeles.
An investigation of (non)personal histories that have constructed existing ideas surrounding the body weave in and out his body of work. He is invested in creating
and experiencing moments in time inaccessible to him using ritual and installation; and credits this interest as the primary inspiration for his performances. Rafa earned his B.A. in art from UCLA, has exhibited, performed and also collaborated with other artists in various venues throughout Los Angeles.
–
Luis Flores

My work seeks to shed light on topics that are often ignored with blindly accepted norms, topics
that trigger unconscious and automatic responses to preconceived expectations or beliefs about
particular situations. I seek to break stereotypes with which I am often labeled and to which I am
confined or restricted. It is my hope to challenge viewers’ reactions and elicit self-reflection on how the environment has contributed to their conditioned self and how they continue to perpetuate a situation consistent with their preconceptions.
–
Marcela Fuentes (marshagall) is a performance scholartist from Argentina. She currently lives in Los Angeles where she teaches, writes, and performs on topics such as transnationalism, new forms of political engagement, and artistic responses to crises.
–
J. Frank Galarte was born and raised in Brawley, California. He recently received his PhD from the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign and is currently a visiting professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona. He is currently working on a book manuscript based on this dissertation entitled, “El Sabor del Amor y del Dolor: Affect, Violence and the (Trans)Body in the Chican@ Historical Imaginary”. His research interests are in Chicana@ Studies, Queer Studies, Affect Studies and Transgender Studies. His obsessions are mozz, chavela vargas, oldies and finding the right pomade for his pompadour.
–
Micha Cárdenas is an artist/theorist who works in performance, wearable electronics, hacktivism and critical gender studies. She is a PhD student in Media Arts and Practice (iMAP) at University of Southern California and a member of Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0. Her book The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities, published by Atropos Press in 2012, discusses artists’ strategies for using multiple realities, such as augmented, mixed and alternate reality, and the intersection of those strategies with the politics of gender, in a transnational context. She blogs at transreal.org and tweets at @michacardenas.
–
Raquel Gutiérrez (b. 1976, Los Angeles, California) cut her teeth on Los Angeles performance art when she interned and house managed at Highways Performance Space in the year 2000. Raquel is a performance writer, playwright, and cultural organizer, studied in university settings and performed in a variety of locations, like the Salvadoran countryside, cabarets, galleries, San Antonio, more universities, Pico-Union, etc. In 2001, Gutiérrez was one of the co-founding members of the performance ensemble, Butchlalis de Panochtitlan (BdP), a community-based and activist-minded group aimed at creating a visual vernacular around queer Latinidad in Los Angeles. Raquel also co-founded other queer women of color projects and Latino projects, Tongues, A Project of VIVA and Epicentro Poetry project. Raquel has published work in Ambientes: New Queer Latino Writing (edited by Lázaro Lima and Felice Picano), Los Angeles Weekly, Make/shift magazine, Journal of Chicana/Latina Studies, and Izote Vos: Salvadoran American Literary and Visual Art (published by SF’s Pacific News Service). Currently, Raquel is in the Community Scholars program through the UCLA School of Urban Planning and is also the Manager of Community Partnerships for Cornerstone Theater Company, a leader in community-based theater-making in the United States.

Tickets $20/$15 buy them here:

http://highwaysperformance.org/highways/performance/latinao-queer-literary-series-1-wanderlust/

Flyers here: http://www.facebook.com/events/392497744111378/

[Rough cut for preview]

Find Each Other
part of Local Autonomy Networks

project concept, poem and fashion hacking: micha cárdenas
movement: allison wyper and natalie rosen
camera and fashion hacking: claire viele

“How do we find each other,” asks the Invisible Committee in The Coming Insurrection. Performed at Highways Performance Space, A Night of Transanarchism, April 6, 2012, Find Each Other is based on two custom made proximity sensing garments that use Xbee wireless mesh networking to activate electroluminescent wire when in each other’s presence. Find Each Other is an experimental movement piece in which two performers explore space to the sound of poetry, using proximity sensing electronic garments from the Autonets series. Autonets is inspired by an urge to create technologies to facilitate communication for community based, anti-racist, prison abolitionist responses to gendered violence, creating networked fashion to reimagine social organization.

More information about Autonets:
transreal.org/2011/11/04/autonets-local-autonomy-networks/

Camera by Claire Viele

Special thanks to Jack Halberstam for input on this project.

Support provided by USC Media Arts and Practice, School of Cinematic Arts

transreal.org

You are invited to join the discussion and pass it on!

http://lists.transreal.org/listinfo.cgi/q-transreal.org

DEATH OF MY DAUGHTER: Photo & Video Installation by Leon Mostovoy Leon Mostovoy is a transgender artist who has been creating on the fron the queer and political art movements for decades.

Opening Reception from 7.00-8.30
Followed by…

NIGHT OF TRANS-ANARCHISM
begins @ 8.30pm

Micha Cárdenas in collaboration with Allison Wyper and Natalie Rosen, fashion hacking in collaboration with Claire Viele

Find Each Other

“How do we find each other,” asks the Invisible Committee in The Coming Insurrection. Find Each Other is an experimental movement piece in which two performers explore space to the sound of poetry, using proximity sensing electronic garments from the Autonets series. Autonets is inspired by an urge to create technologies to facilitate communication for community based, anti-racist, prison abolitionist responses to gendered violence.

Talia Bettcher
Shattered Mirror

is a fusion of performed story-telling and philosophical experimentation. Using the liminal space of theatricality and drawing on my life as a transsexual woman….

Pony Lee Estrange
Pigs In the Parlour / TRANSMUTE

a body of work that brings childhood confusions of gender and sex to a physical plane, this piece will combine
video projection, live soundscapes and theatrical manipulation of the body.

Metahuman, aka Kalil Cohen
It is So Pomo

So Pomo takes “No Homo”, dunks it in glitter, and gives it a good spanking.

Deb Simone

Face For Sale: Bitch, Bitch, Bitch!

The lighter, less clinical, but no less painful side of the Facial Feminization pilgrimage.

Leon Wu – MC
A queer transgender and masculine-of-center (MoC) identified fashionista and performer.

Highways Performance Space & Gallery

$20/$15 for students

Buy tickets at Highwaysperformance.org

They Say We’re Sick is a live performance of theory, poetry and media from my personal archive. Using a feminist aesthetic of focusing on everyday experiences that are autobiographical and deeply personal, I discuss the intersections of transgender and disability, by way of the most important femmes in my life. The media in the performance will be photos and videos taken mostly with my cell phone of events in my life. This marks a new direction in my work, an attempt to integrate my practices of philosophical writing, poetic writing and performance into one experience.

The Femme Disturbance series considers the possibilities for queer femme affect to disturb rationalist traditions that give rise to capitalism, heterosexism, ableism, racism and other forms of exclusion. This performance explores the way in which a femme attraction, between a genderqueer transgender person and a queer woman, can create a sense of solidarity for different forms of embodiment deemed excessive: the femme, the mentally ill, the differently abled and the gender non conforming.

They Say We’re Sick is a live performance of theory, poetry and media from my personal archive. Using a feminist aesthetic of focusing on everyday experiences that are autobiographical and deeply personal, I will discuss the intersections of transgender and disability, by way of the most important femmes in my life. The media in the performance will be photos and videos taken mostly with my cell phone of events in my life. This marks a new direction in my work, an attempt to integrate my practices of philosophical writing, poetic writing and performance into one experience.

The Femme Disturbance series considers the possibilities for queer femme affect to disturb rationalist traditions that give rise to capitalism, heterosexism, ableism, racism and other forms of exclusion. This performance will explore the way in which a femme attraction, between a genderqueer transgender person and a queer woman, can create a sense of solidarity for different forms of embodiment deemed excessive: the femme, the mentally ill, the differently abled and the gender non conforming.

Digital Humanities: Creative Activism in the Age of Digital Technologies

Come and join me to celebrate the release of my new book The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities at the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives!

There will be a introduction by Jordan Crandall and Jack Halberstam and then I’ll do a brief reading from the book.

Thursday, April 5th, 2012
6pm-7:30pm

909 W. Adams Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90007

Wine and light refreshments will be served outside in the garden area.

Get your copy online from Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Transreal-Political-Aesthetics-Crossing-Realities/dp/0983915245/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1329952222&sr=8-2

The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities explores the use of multiple simultaneous realities as a medium in contemporary art, including mixed reality, augmented reality and alternate reality approaches. Building on the notion of “trans” from transgender, signifying the crossing of boundaries, the book proposes that transreal aesthetics cross the boundaries created by a proliferation of conceptions of reality that occurred as a result of postmodern theory and emerging technologies.

Proposing three operations for dealing with multiple realities, The Transreal discusses artists and art collectives including Blast Theory, mez breeze, Reza Negarestani, Ricardo Dominguez and Zach Blas. Through these artists’ work and Cárdenas’ own artwork, including Becoming Dragon and collaborations with Elle Mehrmand Becoming Transreal, technésexual and virus.circus, The Transreal demonstrates that transreal aesthetics have broad implications across new media, performance art and electronic literature. The book spans a wide range of genres including theoretical analyses of artworks, poetry, source code, photos of performances and wearable electronics, and discussions with leading thinkers in new media and performance art including Stelarc, Allucquére Rosanne Stone and Ricardo Dominguez.

Thanks to the ONE Archives for hosting this event! http://www.onearchives.org/

http://schedule.sxsw.com/2012/events/event_IAP100223

Enjoy.