Kickstarter for Local Autonomy Networks
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
Find Each Other: Local Autonomy Networks, Highways Performance Space [video]
[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
Q – Queer media art, theory, praxis, discussion
Q is a list for queer media art, theory, praxis, discussion, started by myself and Zach Blas. Anyone who is interested is welcome. We have grand hopes for future events and publications relating to the list, which we will begin discussing more formally in May. Micha and I see a need for more space for discussing queer new media and queer media art, which we identify as an emerging art/political/theory movement.
You are invited to join the discussion and pass it on!
They Say We’re Sick: Performance Friday, March 30th in LA and NYC
Come see They Say We’re Sick, part of my Femme Disturbance series at the Institute of Multimedia Literacy in Los Angeles and at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at NYU on Friday March 30th, 2012, 1:30PM PST / 4:30PM EST.
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
Digital technologies have offered scholars, artists, and activists new strategies to address a broad array of social problems, enabling powerful new connections between artistic production, political action, and humanities scholarship. This symposium will explore the relationship between creativity, activism and digital technologies, and examine the new forms of political intervention, collaboration, and corporalities which these have enabled.
The event will include presentations by Faye Ginsburg (NYU), Jacques Servin (The Yes Men/NYU), and Aaron Bady (UC Berkeley), a digital performance by Micha Cardenas (USC), and responses from Diana Taylor (NYU), Michael Stoller (NYU), Tavia Nyong’o (NYU),Nicholas Mirzoeff (NYU), and Debra Levine (NYU).
Hemispheric Institute of Performance & Politics
20 Cooper Sq, 5th Floor
New York, NY 10003
Free, photo ID required. Reception to follow.
This event is co-sponsored by The Digital Humanities Working Research Group, a project of the Humanities Initiative led by Diana Taylor (University Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish, and Director of the Hemispheric Institute) and Michael Stoller (Director of Collections and Research Services, New York University Libraries) that brings together a broad range of humanists and technologists from across NYU to discuss the role and implication of digital technologies in the Humanities.
Audio of Queer Viral Practices Panel at SXSW
The audio recording of our panel from this year’s SXSW Interactive is up. You can listen here:
http://schedule.sxsw.com/2012/events/event_IAP100223
Enjoy.
The Transreal book is now available!
The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities is now available on Amazon.com. I am so thrilled to say that my new book was released in February 2012. I hope you enjoy it and if you write a review, please let me know! Or if you know of a university or bookstore that would like to host an event, please comment on this post and I’ll get back to you via email. Thank you!
From the back cover:
“In this daring and poetic study, Micha Cárdenas guides us through the world of the transexual, the transgenerational, the transpolitical, the transborder. The transreal is both a multilayered space and an existential condition. Brilliant.”
Diana Taylor, University Professor, Performance Studies and Spanish, New York University
“The book itself, a provocative combination of theory, art, and autobiography, is at once a field guide, operating manual, and diary that embodies the mobile, mixed realities that it activates and describes, bringing together erotics and ethics within its calls to action.”
Jordan Crandall, Associate Professor, Visual Arts, UC San Diego
“Micha Cárdenas and her playmates are ontological guerrillas who know that blowing up the dominant order of power/knowledge is only the first step towards real revolution. The crucial next step is materializing virtual possibilities immanent in our current situation.”
Susan Stryker, Associate Professor, University of Arizona