Calling All Hacktivists! #OccupyData Hack-A-Thon Dec 9-11, 2011 #occupyla #ows #occupywallst
The HASTAC Community, Standards and Seeing Interdisciplinary Connections
This year, I’m a HASTAC Scholar, which means I’m blogging both on this site and on theirs. Actually, since this site is mostly for announcements, I do most of my blogging over at HASTAC nowadays. I’m posting part of this entry here to help spur more discussion about these topics.
http://hastac.org/blogs/michacardenas/2011/11/26/hastac-community-standards-and-interdisciplinarity
The recent discussion in the thread Community Standards for Virtual Spaces was spurred by, among other posts, my post of Elle Mehrmand’s performance fauxlographic. The post contained an image from the performance which contained nudity, and therefore the HASTAC site admins edited my post to remove the image and link to the UCSD Visual Art Department‘s website which is hosting the image. I wish that this wasn’t two weeks before the end of the semester and I didn’t have two papers to write, on top of conference papers, publisher deadlines and deadlines for galleries for spring shows, so that I had more time to respond. Still, I am eager to post a few thoughts in response to the very rich discussions which have taken place in the standards forum.
First, I want to state in response to Fiona’s self described “disjointed” comment, which was actually very compelling and apparently very heartfelt, that I love HASTAC. I have met some of my nearest and dearest colleagues in academic thanks to HASTAC, as well as developed sone wonderful friendships. I even met my current PhD advisor, Jack Halberstam, in the HASTAC forum on Queer and Feminist New Media Spaces. I am joining in this discussion with the best of intentions, in order to participate as a HASTAC scholar in making HASTAC as amazing, participatory and transformative as I believe it can be. I am so grateful to the HASTAC scholars, to Fiona and Cathy and everyone who makes HASTAC possible and holds open this space for artistic, academic and theoretical experimentation.
Second, I am very concerned about the suggestion that the legal Terms of Service be used as the basis for the Community Standards document. Among other things, the Terms of Service prohibits posting any material which is “offensive… vulgar, obscene, profane, or is racially, ethnically or is otherwise objectionable;… (iii) Content that is pornographic, sexually explicit or contains nudity; … Content which contains software, software viruses… links to other websites that contain Content not in compliance with the Terms of Service” These restrictions, as I understand them, could be easily interpreted to disallow Critical Code Studies discussions of software code for computer viruses, The Queer and Feminist New Media forum’s discussion of Monica Ong’s skin whitening remedy for asian women, Alexis Lothian’s vidding discussion which links to erotic (possibly pornographic) vid remixes of Battlestar Galactica, and a whole host of other very important discussions on HASTAC regarding the intersections of digital culture with art, race, gender, sex and ability and how those intersections inform our understanding of comtemporary power and social control.
The point made by John Carter McKnight is central, I think, in that the real problem here is self-policing at the risk of preventing important discussions of contemporary issues. I cited Ai Weiwei’s recent tweet saying ”if they see nudity as pornography then china is stuck in the Qing dynasty” not to be snarky, but to point to the fact that these issues are very contemporary and global. The removal of Elle Mehrmand’s poster for fauxlographic cannot be separated from the fact that her performance is about Iran and Wikileaks. Her body parts as covered or uncovered in that flyer are a direct response to the headscarves worn by Muslim women and the perception of certain types of bodies as terrorist bodies, the agency of women to choose to over or uncover themselves and the rhetorics of American exceptionalism which would present the US as a rational place of democracy in contrast to an oppressive regime which forces women to cover their bodies in order to justify military action against Iran.
By removing her flyer, HASTAC is reproducing the act of forcing women’s bodies to be covered up which Iran and other middle eastern countries are accused of as a justification for war, and doing so under a heteronormative rhetoric of protecting the children.
The Transreal – Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities
UPDATE 2/2012: The Transreal book is now available on Amazon.com
Published by Atropos Press in January 2012, The Transreal includes texts written by myself and in collaboration with Elle Mehrmand and transcriptions of panels with Stelarc, Sandy Stone, Ricardo Dominguez, Amy Sara Carroll, Brian Holmes and James Morgan. Zach Blas is the editor of the book. Below is a description of the book.
The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities explores the use of multiple simultaneous realities as a medium in contemporary art. Building on the notion of “trans” from transgender, meaning crossing boundaries of gender, I propose that transreal aesthetics cross the boundaries created by a proliferation of conceptions of reality that occurred as a result of postmodern theory. Building on the notion of experimental affective politics that I developed in my first book Trans Desire/Affective Cyborgs, co-authored with Barbara Fornssler, I claim that an understanding of building and working with multiple realities is essential for artists and political actors to have agency today.
Proposing three operations for dealing with multiple realities, The Transreal discusses artists and art collectives including: Blast Theory, whose alternate reality game “Ulrike and Eamon Compliant” invites users to walk the streets of Venice as the leftist militant Ulrike Meinhoff; mez breeze, whose poems explore anonymous hacktivism through her own literary genre that uses code syntax to perform multiple characters simultaneously; and Reza Negarestani, Ricardo Dominguez and Zach Blas’ whose works invent new fields of technological imaginary, creating their own logics. Through these artists’ work and my own, I demonstrate that the medium of transreal art has broad implications across new media, performance art, e-poetry and emerging literary genres. The book spans a wide range of genres including theoretical analyses of artworks, poetry, source code, technical diagrams, photos of performances and custom made electronics as well as discussions with leading thinkers in the fields of new media and performance art including Stelarc, Rosanne Allucquére Stone and Ricardo Dominguez.
The book includes writings from and about my own transreal performances: Becoming Dragon and collaborations with Elle Mehrmand including Becoming Transreal, technésexual and virus.circus. Becoming Dragon (2008) questions the one-year requirement of “Real Life Experience” that transgender people must fulfill in order to receive Gender Confirmation Surgery, and asks if this could be replaced by one year of ‘Second Life Experience’ to lead to Species Reassignment Surgery. For the performance, I lived for 365 hours immersed in the online 3D environment of Second Life with a head mounted display, only seeing the physical world through a video feed, and wrote software to use a motion capture system to map my movements into Second Life. For technésexual (2009-2010), Elle Mehrmand and myself wore custom made heart rate monitors and temperature sensors while we kissed and undressed in front of a live audience. Simultaneously for an audience in Second Life, our avatars also kissed while the sound of our live heart beats was played for both audiences, pitch shifted according to our body temperatures, creating an organic interface for making music. Becoming Transreal (2010) was performed at the UCLA Freud Playhouse and consisted of a ritual in which I would read a poem and once each poem ended, Elle Mehrmand would use a hand pump to increase the pressure in suction cups attached to my breasts while we were both motion captured by a Vicon motion capture system that moved our avatar’s positions in real time. The performance used slipstream poetry to consider possible futures of nano-bio drug piracy and the intersections of transnational and transgender experiences. virus.circus is an episodic series of performances exploring a speculative world of queer futures of latex sexuality and DIY medicine in resistance to virus hysteria. Code switching between mixed and alternate reality, virus.circus asks how we can use reality as a medium, resonating across a number of modes including public space interventions, performances in museums and galleries and networked performances.
The notion of transreal is informed by the theorist Jack Halberstam who makes “the perhaps overly ambitious claim that there is such a thing as “queer time” and “queer space.”” Expanding on this, one can see the acceptance and embrace of multiple worlds, times and realities as a fundamental characteristic of late postmodernism or post-postmodernism.
UCLA Queer Studies Conference and QUEERTURE: QUEER + COUTURE
I’ll be speaking on a panel on Friday at the UCLA Queer Studies Conference on the topic of “Wearable Electronics as Femme Disturbance”, discussing virus.circus and my new project, Autonets. The panel is going to be amazing with lots of other digital media scholars! I am so honored to be on this panel with them. I can’t wait! Also, I’m going to be showing some new wearable electronics from the Autonets series in the Queerture Fashion show.
3:00 – 4:15 Royce 306
Techno-Queer Self Fashioning: Digital Theory by Digital Praxis
Moderator:
Michael Stambolis, Sociology, University of California – Los Angeles
Speakers:
“The Real and the Fake: Asian American Digitality, Drag Kings, & ‘All of Me’”
Margaret Rhee, Ethnic Studies, University of California – Berkeley
“Borrowed Time: Fan Video and Queer Temporality through a Cylon Digital Remix Machine”
Alexis Lothian, English, University of Southern California
“Please Select Gender: Video Games and Butch Expression”
Amanda Phillips, English, University of California – Santa Barbara
“Wearable Electronics as Femme Disturbance: Sex Positive Community Responses to Gendered Violence”
Micha Cárdenas, Interdivisional Media Arts and Practice, University of Southern California
QUEERTURE: QUEER + COUTURE
Featuring LGBTQ designers, stylists and fashion illustration
For Immediate Release
Contact: Tania Hammidi, Artistic Director
queerture at gmail d0t c0m
LOS ANGELES October 15, 2011 6 – 7pm — An epic LGBTQ fashion show is befalling the UCLA campus as the final event of a two-day conference “Queer Fashion,” organized by UCLA’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Studies Program. According to Artistic Director Tania Hammidi, “this show is a sartorial meeting of the super-powers; we’re featuring LGBTQ models, designers, and stylists to produce a show that busts the seams of classic runway shows.”
Queerture 2011 is hosting a spectrum of L G B T Q I A designs, styles, and struts – from fierce femme style to trans wearable electronics, from vintage & suited dapperness to contemporary urban wear, from boxers to one-of-a-kind hats. Free and open to the public. JOIN US!
Location: 314 Royce Hall, UCLA Campus
Parking: Lot 5, $11
Directions: http://www.uclalive.org/visit/royce_hall.asp
Sponsored: by over 28 UCLA departments and units
Fashion designs by: Styling by:
Studs Clothing and Debonair Laura Luna-Creative Xicana
Michael and Hushi Dapper Dyke-Vivian Escalante
Stafford & Shelton
Jimmy Au’s Suits for Men 5’ 8” and Under, with stylist Leon Wu
Micha Cárdenas and Adam Tinnel
Performance and Installation:
Pre-show, “Shrouds of Aloha’s Kiki” by Aloha Tolentino
Costume design from performance artist Nao Bustamante
Installation by Guinevere Turner
Durational fashion performance “Mountain” by Aaron Valenzuela
Make-Up/Hair: Fashion Illustration:
Pony Lee Estrange Maria Leung
Sparrow Fox Karen Dhillon
Aubrie Davis Lindsay Fackrell
Color Beat Los Angeles
Short Interview with Riku Matsuda on KPFK
Listen to me being interviewed by Riku Katsuda on Flip the Script on KPFK!
We talked about virus.circus in the Speculative show at LACE!
Click here to listen (it’s the last 10 minutes):
http://archive.kpfk.org/parchive/mp3/kpfk_110808_200030matsuda.MP3
Two awesome panels in LA that I’ll be on this week!
I’m so thrilled to be able to be part of these two panels with such amazing people.
The 6th Annual Transgender Leadership Summit
Art as Activism Panel with Kalil Cohen and Wu Tsang
2:45-4:15pm
7377 Santa Monica Boulevard
West Hollywood, CA 90046
United States
Then on Thursday the panel for the Speculative show that Elle and I are in at LACE will be happening. Come and join us for a discussion of speculative art practice and its relation to political activism!
Speculative, Panel and Discussion
Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions
Thursday 28 July, 2011
7-9PM
Panel Discussion with Christopher O’Leary, Zach Blas, Jack Halberstam, Rita Raley and Jordan Crandall.
Purchase an online copy of the exhibition catalogue from Lulu here.
