UCSD Stop Dr. Helen’s deportation – give Dr. Helen a chance to appeal her termination!
I sent this:
//
When: Now!
What: Call Chancellor Fox and demand due process for Dr. Helen @ 858-534-3135
Why: Stop Dr. Helen’s deportation – give Dr. Helen a chance to appeal her termination!
* Dr. Wilda Helen is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Bioengineering @UC San Diego. Dr. Helen was fired on January 6, 2011 based on false allegations.
* Dr. Helen is appealing her termination under the fair grievance procedure in the union contract. However,
* UCSD is trying to force Dr. Helen to leave the country this Saturday, February 5 – before she can appeal her termination. University administrators have terminated Dr. Helen’s record in the federal SEVIS registry (student and exchange visitor information system). As such, Dr. Helen cannot legally remain in the United States beyond Saturday, February 5.
* Chancellor Fox can solve this problem: the University has the ability to fix this problem – they can restore Dr. Helen’s record in the SEVIS system and give Dr. Helen a fair chance to appeal her termination.
Call Chancellor Fox now @ 858-534-3135 and demand:
Due process and fair treatment for immigrant workers at UCSD!
or email her at chancellor@ucsd.edu
bang.Lab / EDT Update, Call for Accountability and the Criminalization of Research
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.
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
Interview on NBC about the Transborder Immigrant Tool
I don’t feel like this was really my best interview, with all the “like”‘s and the distracted glancing around, but I’m still happy that our project, the Transborder Immigrant Tool, is bringing attention to the real need for humanitarian intervention to stop the thousands of deaths sensely occurring in the desert of the US/Mexico Border. Text version of the story is here.
We’ve really been getting a ton of press since the Vice magazine interview with Ricardo, which also mentioned the Freephone project. Yet I’m consistently impressed at how the media continues to misconstrue the story. They just want to sensationalize it as much as possible and keep talking about it as if it was an app to download for an iPhone, even though we keep telling them its not that, its a phone and j2me/java application that we’re still testing and will soon be distributing in Mexico, soon being next year, hopefully.
Ricardo Dominguez, co-founder of the Electronic Disturbance Theater, also did a long interview for NPR about the Transborder Immigrant Tool, which you can hear here. The interview had a lot of people calling in who made very heated comments, as well as a discussion with the Border Patrol.
Today, 1pm, Los Angeles, Dorkbot Socal at Machine Project
Dorkbot SoCal 38
Saturday, October 31st, 2009
1pm
Micha Cárdenas – Lecturer, Visual Arts Department, UCSD //
Artist/Researcher, Experimental Game Lab and b.a.n.g. lab
Chris Head – MFA Candidate UCSD // Artist/Researcher, Experimental
Game Lab and b.a.n.g. lab
Elle Mehrmand – MFA Candidate UCSD // Musician, Assembly of Mazes //
Artist/Researcher, b.a.n.g. lab
->http://va-grad.ucsd.edu/~drupal/node/918
The Freephone is an art project that aims to provide people just deported from the US with a free phone call. To achieve this, a group of UCSD MFA students and graduates came together to present the phone at the Lui Velazquez gallery in Tijuana, just a few feet from the turnstiles where people who are deported are dropped off by the border patrol. The project is by Chris Head, Micha Cárdenas, Elle Mehrmand, Katherine Sweetman, Felipe Zuñiga and Camilo Ontiveros.
The Freephone is an effort to use new media performance art or performance with technology to make the experience that people who are deported from the US a little bit less difficult. To make the phone, the artists bought a non working payphone casing from Ebay.com, wired it to a new $10 phone from a store and hooked that up to an adapter which would allow the phone to make calls over the internet. Then, the phone was installed outside of the Lui Velazquez gallery and the artists invited people coming through the turnstiles at the border to make a free phone call.
D.V. Rogers
->http://pieqf.allshookup.org/
Leaving no trace, the Parkfield Interventional EQ Fieldwork (PIEQF) was a geologically interactive machine earthwork temporarily installed in the remote township of Parkfield, Central California during the summer of 2008. This time-sharing, performance earthwork merged together the micro-seismic resonance of geological time and the autonomous operation of a ready-made, modified machine, producing an immersive, digitally mapped 21st century machine earthwork action.
Owen Gerst
->http://stolondesign.com/
Owen Gerst is engaged in the process of architecture, but casts aside the title of architect. He is a representative of ideas, and draws a distinction between building and architecture. Building serves basic raw needs. Architecture is about something – an IDEA. It is the IDEA that, through the creative process, serves as the catalyst in a process of transformation – turning the very basic into something special, unique, and magnificent. The IDEA is the essence of architecture, and it is the IDEA that Gerst is interested in – the IDEA in all its forms and methods of representation.
Video: The Transborder Immigrant Tool: Violence, Solidarity and Hope in Post-NAFTA Circuits of Bodies Electr(on)/ic
Click the image or link here to see my talk, which was co-written with Ricardo Dominguez, Amy Sara Carroll and Brett Stalbaum, and click the link below for the rest of the talks, all of which were amazing! And don’t believe the warning on the page I’m linking to about Windows, it works fine in Ubuntu. I’ll also be prsenting a version of this paper in Bonn, Germany in September at the Mobile HCI conference workshop on Community Practices and Locative Media.
Transborder Immigrant Tool
Micha Cardenas, MFA Candidate, UC San Diego
Length: 29:54 [video ]
Violence, Technology and Public Intervention
San Diego, May 14, 2009 — Calit2 at UC San Diego and the UC Digital Arts Research Network (UCDARnet) sponsored a recent symposium on art’s role in addressing the current and historical relationship between technology and violence. It was in connection with a new gallery@calit2 exhibit about anti-personnel land mines.
The exhibit, “The Anti-Personnel Mines Project” by Argentine new-media artist Carlos Trilnick, runs through June 10, 2009 at the intimate gallery space on the first floor of Atkinson Hall. The interactive installation focuses on the long-term devastation that land mines produce, even decades after an armed conflict has ended. Trilnick was the keynote speaker at the “Violence, Technology and Public Intervention” symposium on April 24 at Calit2, which features panel discussion on public intervention as art — and the art of public intervention. Artists from UC San Diego and other institutions talked about projects ranging from the “Public Secrets Project” to the “Transborder Immigrant Tool.”
The symposium presentations are now available for on-demand viewing here.