Also posted at bang.calit2.net.
In the past few weeks, a number of developments have happened in relation to the art/research practices of the bang.lab and Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT) which we wish to share with the public in accordance with our long history of radical transparency.
- Since the November of 2009 the Transborder Immigrant Tool has become a media event with many groups and individuals, such as Congressman Duncan Hunter in his Op-ed in the San Diego Union Tribune, calling for the defunding of the Transborder Immigrant Tool, the University of California system began a financial audit of the project on January 11, 2010, in which they requested that every member involved be interviewed by Audit & Management Advisory Services (UCSD). The exact investigations (they claim that they are multiple) under way have yet to be clarified by UCOP or other UC entities, but in the interviews thus far, TBT members have been questioned about the usage of the funds and the originality of the project. The investigation has ‘arrested’ TBT’s developmental process and core research matrix.
- Indeed, due to widespread media coverage of the Transborder Immigrant Tool, members of bang.lab and EDT also have been receiving copious hateful email and paper letters, some including threats of physical violence and murder. Beyond the racist, xenophobic, classist, misogynist, homophobic and transphobic “excitable speech” of the threats, the gendered nature of these hyperbolic responses has been as clear as the correspondence received in recent weeks by national representatives who voted for health care legislation or federal justices charged with representing those accused of terrorist acts.
- On March 2nd, Markyudof.com publicly declared the resignation of UCOP Mark Yudof in a gesture of minor simulation to encourage the imagining of other possible futures. On March 21st, bang.lab received notice that a faculty member at UC Riverside was being investigated in relation to this action.
- On March 4th, bang.calit2.net hosted a virtual sit-in against the UCOP website, providing a space for many people concerned with public education to embody their dissent online. As a result, UCSD IT Security shut down our server’s access to the Internet for eight days. After that, we were informed that an investigation by the Senior Vice Chancellor (SVC) was begun by the UCOP of Ricardo Dominguez seeking criminal charges for the virtual sit-in, despite the legal precedent that a virtual sit-in is political speech, not a DDOS attack. This investigation has been framed by SVC as potential reason to end Professor Dominguez’s tenure.
We feel that these events indicate a number of troubling trends within the current transnational struggle for education (and more equal distribution of resources, more generally speaking!):
- A complete disregard for our academic freedom as researchers engaging in trajectories of art, literature and technology research that the Visual Arts Department and CALIT2 consider to be extremely valuable, and for which Professor Dominguez earned tenure for.
-The use of bureaucracy as a weapon, to prevent our research from continuing by bogging us down in endless meetings with accountants and investigations.
- The criminalization of dissent: across the UC system and the world on March 4th people engaged in actions, including civil disobedience, to try to restore public education, stop the budget cuts and work towards a better future for education. We are among hundreds of people facing charges for engaging in dissent from the very institutions that claim to foster independent thinking, including the group of students recently threatened with 6 month suspensions.
While we feel that poetry, walking art and queer technology cannot be quantified, “spread-sheet Excel-ed,” we in the bang lab harbor our own concerns for the lack of accountability that enables the UC system to continue transforming a public university for the state of California into a private corporation, accessible to a select few. That same selective lack of accountability fails to count the number of deaths tragically occurring because of international borders. To perform our own due diligence in the spirit of accounting for the here and now, we seek to “queer the census”: if you feel that you are a part of the bang.lab or have participated in any of our activities in mind, body, spirit (in real or virtual timespace), get up, stand up, sign your name at bang.calit2.net in a comment.
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