Roundtable with Michael Hardt and new EDT2.0 article in Digimag
Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0 in Digimag is out today:
We are Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0 – EDT2.0 (http://www.thing.net/~rdom/ecd/EDTECD.html). As a collective, we are already many. As a multiplicity, our goals, hopes and intentions are multiple. Our shared goals include the disturbance of borders: national, gender, genre, disciplinary, fiction/non, through the exploitation and re/performance of technology, poetry and the imaginaries of each…
We create media viruses, dislocative border disturbance technologies and Electronic Civil Disobedience actions in order to imagine and bring about desired futures. We exploit existing media technologies in order to conjure spirits of mayan technologies and queer technologies in the crackle on the line and the dropped packets of neo-liberalism. Our hallucinatory transmissions operate at the refresh rate of dreams.
Also, in April I’ll be on a roundtable with Michael Hardt at UCSD. Hardt and Negri were very influential to me so I’m very excited about this. I feel like the UC Struggle has really died down, at least at UCSD, despite the fact that the situation continues to worsen. Hopefully this will be a good opportunity to talk about why and help to spark some new energy. I also really love talking to Michael Hardt who’s actually a really warm person. It should be a great event.
Roundtable with Michael Hardt
Friday, April 8, 2011
3:00 – 5:00 p.m.
Literature Building, Room 155 (de Certeau)
This Roundtable Discussion will address the current crisis in higher education, particularly California: its impact on the social sciences, arts, and humanities; and the role of student movements in the larger fight against the privatization of education and its corollaries.
Panelists:
Michael Hardt, Professor, Duke University
Micha Cardenas, Interim Associate Director, Art & Technology Culture, Art and Technology Program, Sixth College, UC San Diego
Roshanak Kheshti, Associate Professor, Ethnic Studies, UC San Diego
Luis Martin-Cabrera, Assistant Professor, Literature, UC San Diego
Michael Hardt events co-sponsored by:
Dean’s Opportunity Fund, Division of Arts & Humanities
Dean’s Initiative Fund, Division of Arts & Humanities
Department of Anthropology
Department of Communications
Department of Ethnic Studies
Department of History
Department of Literature
Department of Political Science
Helen Edison Fund
Parking: Parking officers DO CHECK weekdays until 11pm. Parking is $2/hour in the Gilman Parking Structure, closest to the Literature Building. The entrance is at Villa La Jolla Drive & Gilman Drive. Phone – Campus parking office: (858) 534-4223. Campus map: http://maps.ucsd.edu/Acrobat/MainCampus.pdf (see black arrow in the middle showing the Gilman parking structure). Literature is Building #627. Campus map: http://maps.ucsd.edu/Acrobat/MainCampus.pdf (see 7-G) or http://www-act.ucsd.edu/maps/ (use Search tab for Gilman Parking Structure)
To request necessary and reasonable accommodations to enable access and participation for people with disabilities, contact Nancy Daly at ndaly@ucsd.edu or 858-534-4618
Electronic Disturbance Theater
We took a bunch of photos for our story in Citybeat, which comes out this wednesday. In this photo are Brett Stalbaum, Amy Sara Carroll, Elle Mehrmand, Ricardo Dominguez and myself. We are the Electronic Disturbance Theater.
Photo by Kinsee Morlan, thanks kinsee!
Occupy the University: Reconsidering the Local, new journal article out!
The new journal from the graduate students of the UCSD visual arts department, pros*, was released this week, and its awesome. It deals with questions of public culture, electronic media, the changing nature of public space and the question of the university as a site of political engagement. You can read the whole journal at http://pros.ucsd.edu and my article is here, with an excerpt below: http://bang.calit2.net/pros/?page_id=11
Occupy the University: Reconsidering the Local
Micha Cárdenas
In a conversation recorded for pros* journal, Teddy Cruz and Rick Lowe agree that socially engaged art has the ability to actually change the material conditions under which art is made and in which people’s lives occur. They seem to agree that the best way to change housing conditions is to engage at the level of local legislation, housing associations and city governments. I would like to intervene on this point. While I agree that socially engaged art can change people’s lives, my intervention, to be simple, is to say that the decision about how to intervene is not so simple. Cruz and Lowe urge artists to engage in local city politics, yet I argue that perhaps an even more local focus may be more beneficial. In her book When Species Meet, Donna Haraway describes a feminist approach to political ethics, which accepts our finitude, contingency and historical situatedness. Her approach acknowledges that from a position of a lack of certainty, “there is no outside from which to answer that mandatory question”[2] of what political action to take. Refusing to take a political action is still a political action, and so we are faced with “bearing the mortal consequences” of our choices of where to put our artistic energies in this expanded field where any artistic practice is apparently acceptable. My own affinity with a feminist ethics of uncertainty grew out of my work with Avital Ronell at the European Graduate School where I asked, “But how can we sit and discuss the deep meaning of this punctuation mark while bombs are being dropped on people?” Her response was, to paraphrase, that by introducing doubt into commonly accepted definitions of ideas and political strategies, that the decisions about dropping those bombs, or imprisoning people, may be stalled, changed or ended.
By considering the university institution in which this discussion takes place, with its framework of research and knowledge production, we can find ourselves implicated and complicit on a new level. While the rhetoric of humanist charities or of helping the poor children of the world may sound convincing as a call to involve artists in questions of social engagement, it also serves the institution to appear engaged in the communities. In fact, one could argue that reproducing this dialogue serves to entrench the existing conditions instead of changing them. I propose that a wide section of contemporary artists are concerned with shifting, altering, rethinking and recreating the material conditions of society and choosing very different approaches from Cruz and Lowe, a few of which I will outline here. These artists and activists question the structures that create and enable political and economic conditions, and structures of knowledge production, such as scientific dogma and medical definitions. The Electronic Disturbance Theater’s notion of Science of the Oppressed will serve as a useful guide for understanding practices which seek to re-imagine knowledge production in the service of social movements and oppressed peoples. The practices presented here seek to intervene in society at the level of the causes of social inequity, of the underlying knowledge structures, instead of working through local legislation, which could be seen as merely a symptom….
Art21 Article features my and elle’s collaboration, technesexual
We’re so happy to get this much exposure, through Art21, but also so happy to see new media performance, Second Life and queer/genderqueer/transgender artists being discussed on Art21. Read on and leave a comment so they know people are interested…
Performative Interventions: The Progression of 4D Art in a Virtual 3D World
“Time” is always present in our interaction with works of art, whether we sit to contemplate a painting, stroll past a sculpture, or watch a video piece for its entire duration or cycle. Some works of art are time-based in that the viewer must experience them through the passage of time, as with music, while others refer to time through links or references to art history, our collective human history, or the timelessness of nature.
—Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century, Season 2, Episode: Time
Art in the twenty-first century, reflecting and defining new developments in a variety of areas, has radically extended the conventional media of time-based, or 4D work. Following Virtual Artists’ Immersive Discoveries in a Virtual 3D Frontier, I interviewed several Second Life artists who evoke time in their work…
Artists Azdel Slade (Micha Cardenas) and echolalia Azalee (Elle Mehrmand) set up a live video feed for my Mixed Reality interview with them. Mixed reality (MR) refers to the merging of real and virtual worlds to produce new environments where physical and digital objects co-exist and interact in real time. Mixed Reality events in SL are streamed real-time into a region. Streaming media is projected in the live event and may include feedback via text or audio from the Second Life audience…
Media Frenzy over the Transborder Immigrant Tool
The Transborder Immigrant Tool was the subject of a whirlwind of media attention in the past week. The project has been developed by the Electronic Disturbance Theater, consisting of artists Ricardo Dominguez, Brett Stalbaum, Amy Sara Carroll and Micha Cárdenas. The media coverage included television, radio and print stories including the Associated Press, BBC World, NBC, Fox, and the UCSD Guardian. While the actual stories are too many to list here, the following is a list of some of the major articles. Many media outlets improperly reported it as an Iphone app, others attempted to discredit the project saying it is illegal, and some interviewed Enrique Morones of the Border Angels, one of the humanitarian providers whose water caches the tools directs people to. Overall, the members of the group are extremely happy that the Transborder Immigrant Tool has been so effective in opening up dialog on the dire need for humanitarian aid at the border, where thousands of people have needlessly died. We look forward to completing and deploying the tool in the coming year. [also posted at the b.a.n.g. lab website]
GPS tool helps illegal immigrants cross US border
Associated Press
Celular para cruzar ilegalmente
BBC World
Border Crossing: There’s an App for That
NBC San Diego
Low-Tech App Aids in Crossing Mexican Border
UCSD Guardian
GPS para indocumentados
Telemundo
Border Crossing Application
Fox 5 TV San Diego
GPS Technology to Help Illegal Immigrants
KSRO – Santa Rosa,CA,USA
Poll: 56% say border-crossing tool threatens national security
OC Register
Border-Navigating Phone App Raises Concerns
KMJ Now – Fresno,CA,USA
mobile phone application gets mixed reactions
State Press
Border Crossing: There’s an App for That
NBC Chicago
UCSD Researches Creating Phone App For Border Crossers
MyStateline.com – Rockford,IL,USA
Want to sneak into US? There’s an app for that
WND.com – Washington,DC,USA
Join us Saturday in SL and New Article in Reno News and Review
Saturday, Elle / Echolalia and I will be performing in Second Life and at the Prospectives.09 festival in Reno, Nevada. You can join us on Saturday afternoon in Second Life or in Reno. Check back here and we’ll post the SLURL for you to teleport directly.
The festival, and our performance were reviewed by the Reno News and Review. The article, called Digital graffiti, starts out like this…
Projected onto the wall of a gallery, like a movie screen, is a computer image from the online virtual community Second Life: Two naked feminine avatars passionately embracing. Elle Mehrmand and Micha Cardenas, who bear better-than-passing resemblances to their virtual onscreen counterparts, approach the stage in front of the projection and begin disrobing.
The onstage artists strip to their undergarments and attach heart rate monitors. A fluctuating rhythmic pulse—the artists’ heart rates—can be heard in the gallery. Flashing lights in the chests of the onscreen avatars signify that the same pulse beats there at the exact same rate. Mehrmand and Cardenas embrace, locking lips and enfolding limbs. The connection between the images onstage and onscreen are unmistakable, as their hearts beat as one.
The article is really interesting, includes more of an interview with me and discusses the rest of the festival as well.