becomingdragon | micha cárdenas

Occupy Everything! Today in LA at 2pm, and DAC tomorrow

If you’re in LA this weekend, I’m doing two events that you may want to attend! Today at 2pm I’m helping facilitate a class/workshop/discussion at The Public School about the occupations and strikes against the budget cuts. The class is free and open, join us! Then tomorrow, I’m speaking on the Sex and Sexuality panel at Digital Arts and Culture 2009: After Media about Becoming Dragon, my 365 hour durational performance in Second Life.

If you’re in LA today, check these events out… (so sorry for the short notice!)

http://la.thepublicschool.org/class/1856

The UC strikes and beyond
proposed by sparkle

Part 1
Reading and analysis and strategy discussion. This session took place on 12/05/06.

Part 2 – Occupy Everything! [scheduling]
A continuation of the UC Strikes and Beyond discussion. There seems to be a lot of energy for these discussions, so lets keep them going! We just scratched the surface of a discussion on what we might do collectively, so lets start there next time. Perhaps we should do this twice more and continue the trajectory of half theory discussion and half organizing discussion… Communiques and texts continue to pour out daily as situations unfold, such as the Irvine occupation of the library where the administration changed their policies in response to only an announcement of an occupation: http://studentactivism.net/2009/12/04/uc-irvine-library/ Some of the issues brought up today that we should follow up on: future workshops at tent cities, the public school going on strike, critiques of the occupation strategy and other possible actions, exiting the university, the end of liberal humanism…We still have yet to get very far with a discussion of how to branch out of the UC system.
-azdelSlade

class tags: insurrection // occupation // praxis // strike // wildcat

Dates:
December 5, 2009 at 12:00pm
December 12, 2009 at 2:00pm

Location:
The Public School, 951 Chung King Road

Teacher:
Marc Herbst, Cara Baldwin, Micha Cardenas, Ken Ehrlich

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also, this sounds awesome and i’ll be attending this:

Artist Curated Projects presents
THREE WOMEN

Performances by
DAWN KASPER TAISHA PAGGETT NANCY POPP

DECEMBER 12th, 4-8 pm
@ the home of Eric Kim
2200 BRIER AVENUE, SILVER LAKE CA 90039

Come see me at GLAMFA!

I’ll be showing a few different pieces at GLAMFA, the Greater LA Area MFA show, this year, come out and see them! First, Elle and I are showing the video of Slapshock in the exhibition. Then, on September 6th we’ll be doing a new performance called Technesexual which we’ve been hard at work getting ready. It is part of Mixed Relations and involves a mixed reality performance using biometrics and live audio that responds to our movements in order to explore relationality.Then, I’ll be talking about Becoming Dragon (and both of the above works) on an MFA round table as part of the CSULB Visiting Artist Lecture series on Wednesday, September 9th from 5-7pm.

There are a bunch of other amazing artists from UCSD and from around southern california, so come check it all out! More info at the GLAMFA website.

Becoming Dragon paper from “Engineering Reality of Virtual Reality” conference.

I meant to post this a while back, but I’ve been busy with lots of other things. Here is a revised version of a paper I presented at the Society of Photonic Imaging Engineers conference in San Jose back in Jan. Enjoy.

PDF_icon PDF 1.0MB

SLon de Refuses opens today! Come join us!

Teleport here: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Magoo/122/226/23

More info about the show here…

SLon Central on Magoo SIM (slurl)

Vote for Becoming Dragon in the People’s Choice award here!

The 2009 Unofficial Brooklyn is Watching Year 1 International SLon des Refuses will open in a relaxed and beyond casual way at 1PM SLT 6 August. The exhibition will occasionally be viewed live on a RL (Real Life) 52 inch mega-monitor screen by RL gallery visitors in the front space of the highly regarded RL Jack the Pelican Presents art gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York, along with the SL 30 Best show hosted by the Department of Visual Art at the University of Kansas SIM ( KU ART to the South). To the North of 30 Best is the Impermanence SIM, also hosted by KU ART, where the new incarnation of Brooklyn is Watching now makes its home. So come to Magoo or KU and show off your avatar-as-artwork! Brooklyn will be Watching!

30 Best show on KU (slurl)

Brooklyn is Watching Now on Impermanence (slurl)

The RL Jack the Pelican Presents Gallery (link)

Although all the Slon Artists on Magoo are winners by virtue of being requested to be in the SLon in the first place, there are further rankings to be determined in the Official Brooklyn is Watching Year 1 Festival, including the awarding of the People’s Choice and the Golden Eyeball. The People’s Choice will be made by online poll and the Golden Eyeball will be presented to one of the Final Five on the basis of votes made by RL visitors to the RL Jack the Pelican Presents gallery, not all of whom will be familiar with SL art or its intrinsic nature. The Final Five works will be shown for this purpose over the term of the exhibit on their own wall-mounted monitors in machinima form (link) by filmmaker (and SLon muse) Penumbra Carter.

Details on People’s Choice and Golden Eyeball (link)

For those of you not familiar with Brooklyn is Watching even though your artwork was nominated to be in the 30 Best of Brooklyn is Watching Year 1 (hey, it can happen!), here is a concise description by Juan Rubio from the press release:

“Brooklyn is Watching, conceived of by Jay Van Buren, executed as a collaboration with Boris Kizelshteyn and the Popcha! development team in February 2008, is a breakthrough relational art project that invites interaction between the two thriving art communities of Second Life and Williamsburg, Brooklyn accentuating the power relations between and among them. It consists of a series of inter-related spaces for artists, audiences, and participants. The primary spaces are a square parcel of land (sim) in Second Life where artists are invited to leave their work for one week (when it is automatically returned), and an alcove in the Williamsburg art gallery–Jack the Pelican Presents where the sim can be viewed on a large monitor and entered via an avatar.”

Brooklyn is Watching will also make a machinima appearance at SLCC in San Francisco, 15 August, in the Grand Ballroom (link)

MFA Conversations II – Art Talk, Sat, July 25th, 2-4pm

Come and join me for a conversation! I’m showing Becoming Dragon in this show and I’d love to discuss how it intersects with the other amazing pieces in the show!
MFA CONVERSATIONS PART II
ARTIST TALK at I-5 Gallery
Saturday, July 25, 2009
2PM to 4PM

Conversation: (NOUN) 1. An informal spoken exchange of thoughts and feelings; a familiar talk.
2. Social intercourse; close association. 3. Rare. Close acquaintance, as with an object of study.

I-5 Gallery is pleased to announce the first of two scheduled art talks in conjunction with MFA Conversations Part II on Saturday, July 25, 2009 from 2PM to 4PM. Participating artists are from Art Center College of Design, UC Los Angeles, UC Santa Barbara, UC San Diego, UC Riverside,
Otis and Calarts. Please join several of the artists to discuss their work, each otherʼs work and to share those conversations with you, the public.

Calico Brown
Micha Cardenas
Alison J. Carr
Alejandro Casazi
Kristen Foster
Monica Elayne Hicks
Glenna Jennings
Erica Love
Greg MacLaughlin
Brian J. Marrier
Carrie Maseredjian
Lisa Miller
Clare Parry
Brianna Sendziak
April Totten
Alison Walker
Michiko Yao

We look forward to seeing you on Saturday, July 25th from 2PM to 4PM.

II-5 Gallery
2100 North Main Street, Suite A-9
Los Angeles, CA 90031
323-342-0717
Press Information
For Immediate Release
Contact: Nancy Ramirez, Gallery Director
Curator: Marla Koosed
breweryartwalk@yahoo.com

Video of Critical Digital Studies Workshop

I recently gave a talk entitled “Epistemology of Transition” about Becoming Dragon at Ctheory’s Critical Digital Studies Workshop in Victoria, Canada. The video is now online! You can also see the rest of the amazing talks from the workshop here.

Becoming Dragon: An Epistemology of Transition

How are technologies of transformation facilitating new becomings, new modes of learning and new sites of knowledge? The performance Becoming Dragon sought to explore two lines of technology, Multi-User Virtual Environments and biotechnology. Following Anna Munster’s call for Transversal Technology Studies, this paper is an attempt to map two transversal lines between these two directions of technology: transition or becoming as a mode of being and mixing of realities, genders and sexualities as a strategy of subversion. The intersections of these lines of technology and transversal strategies of action will be examined as operating within and against two fields of knowledge production, phenomenology and what Ricardo Dominguez has called “science of the oppressed”.