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Queer Kids of Queer Parents Against Gay Marraige! and why I’m leaving Facebook

After the amazing stories of information warfare against Wikileaks and their volunteers last week, I’ve decided that I really need to get back into secure daily computing practices. I’ve also been planning on leaving facebook for a while now, to join diaspora, and I know I shouldn’t use Gmail, since I’m a thinking person, so I’m finally making a change. I’ve stopped posting to facebook, and will probably close my account soon, although disturbingly enough I still get lots of art world announcements only through facebook, so we’ll see. There are so many other good reasons to leave it anyway, like that I can have more time to do what I want, like read and spend time with my lover, and other reasons like the ridiculous heteronormative ads and so on. I’ve also started using pgp and tor again, encrypted all of my hard drives, switched back to linux and secured my android. Whew! That feels much better…

So, I’ll be posting here on my blog more again, since I do like to keep in a digital dialog with folks, but I really hope others will join the mass exodus out of facebook and back into all the other great parts of the web and the world. Seriously folks, try twitter! It’s so much better than fb! Or at least use something like seesmic or ping.fm so you can post in lots of places at once.

Today, I found one of those really, really wonderful blogs, outside of facebook’s walls, called Queer Kids of Queer Parents Against Gay Marriage! I love these kids. I just want to hug them.

It’s truly a brilliant and moving piece of writing. Please read it. All of it. I just want to share it with everyone, which is why I’m writing this post. It’s definitely in line with other anti-homonationalist and anti-assimilationist writings, but its just so good and concise and packed with goodness. READ IT!

Here are some choice quotes:

It’s hard for us to believe what we’re hearing these days. Thousands are losing their homes, and gays want a day named after Harvey Milk. The U.S. military is continuing its path of destruction, and gays want to be allowed to fight. Cops are still killing unarmed black men and bashing queers, and gays want more policing. More and more Americans are suffering and dying because they can’t get decent health care, and gays want weddings. What happened to us? Where have our communities gone? Did gays really sell out that easily?

As young queer people raised in queer families and communities, we reject the liberal gay agenda that gives top priority to the fight for marriage equality…

We choose solidarity with immigrant families whom the state denies legal recognition and families targeted by prisons, wars, and horrible jobs. We reject the state violence that separates children from parents and decides where families begin and end, drawing lines of illegality through relationships.  We see this as part of a larger effort on the part of the state to control our families and relationships in order to preserve a system that relies on creating an underclass deprived of security in order to ensure power for a few.  We know that everyone has a complex identity, and that many queer families face separation due to one or more of the causes mentioned here, now or in the future. We would like to see our queer community recognize marriage rights as a short-term solution to the larger problem of the government’s disregard for the many family structures that exist. As queers, we need to take an active role in exposing and fighting the deeper sources of this problem. We won’t let the government decide what does and does not constitute a family…

Rather than choosing to fight the things that keep structural racism intact, the liberal gay agenda has chosen to promote them.  The gay agenda continually fights for increased hate crimes legislation that would incarcerate and execute perpetrators of hate crimes.  We believe that incarceration destroys communities and families, and does not address why queer bashings happen. Increased hate crimes legislation would only lock more people up. In a country where entire communities are ravaged by how many of their members get sent to jail, where prisons are profit-driven institutions, where incarceration only creates more violence, we won’t accept anything that promotes prison as a solution.  Our communities are already preyed upon by prisons – trans people, sex workers, and street kids live with the constant threat of incarceration.  We believe that real, long-term solutions are found in models of restorative and transformative justice, and in building communities that can positively and profoundly deal with violence.  We challenge our queer communities to confront what we are afraid of rather than locking it up, and to join members of our community and natural allies in opposing anything that would expand prisons…

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

Smart phone application helps illegal immigrants navigate safely across border
NBC Spokane Washington

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

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.