“performance art” | micha cárdenas

Call for Performances: Experimental Collectivities: Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics GSI Convergence 2013

Collective Sun: Spirit House, from Hemispheric Institute GSI Convergence 2012, Durham, NC

Hemispheric Institute of Performance & Politics Graduate Student Initiative (Hemi GSI)
Convergence 2013: Experimental Collectivities: Performance Nights | October 11th-13th, 2013
Los Angeles, CA

Call for Performances

Deadline Friday, April 12th 2013

How can we imagine collectivity in the present moment, after new media, when connection is often mediated down to 140 characters, coalitions are negotiated through Facebook and embodied occupations of the streets have reinvigorated people around the world? The Convergence 2013 Curatorial Committee, Zach Blas, Micha Cárdenas and Dino Dinco, invite artists to propose performances within the theme and practice of “Experimental Collectivities.” We are particularly interested in exploring methods that will collectively produce and critique systems of knowledge/power.

The 2nd Hemi GSI Convergence will be an exploratory space of lateral collaboration and alternative pedagogy among scholars, artists and activists from throughout the Americas. Convergence 2013 will be jointly hosted by the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the University of Southern California (USC) on October 11–13, 2013. Hemi GSI will also plan an optional pre-Convergence hosted by University of California, San Diego (UCSD) in La Jolla and Tijuana on October 10th, 2013.

The performance nights at Convergence 2013 will take place on and off campus, in collaboration with local art galleries and can include performances in public space. The exact venues are still being determined.

Possible themes to be adressed include:

Visualizing Cultural Circuits

Tangible and Corporeal Imperialisms

Querying Queerness

Mediatized Cultures and Virtual Communities

Decolonial Feminism

Tourism, Reception and the Ethics of Visiting

Indigeneity, Memory and Praxis

Ecocriticism and the Non-human

Rethinking Textuality

Queer Technologies

Trans/realities

Artists in the Southern California and Northern Baja California regions are encouraged to apply, as the possibility of travel funds is limited.

To apply, please:

1) email a copy of your CV and short bio (200 words) with the Subject: Proposal for Hemi GSI Performance Nights

2) Email a paragraph describing your proposed performance (250-500 words).

3) Describe your technical needs such as projectors, sound, amount of space, lighting, network access, etc.

4) All materials should go to: hemigsi@gmail.com

*Please look for a Call for General Convergence Participation soon*

Punk Ass Queers – Performance in Riverside June 8th

Friday, June 8, 2012
7:30pm
Tikal Bakery 3975 Mission Inn Ave Riverside CA, 92501

Queer intersects punk and DIY in this spatial and temporal exploration of radical queer narratives and DIY performance art in the Inland Empire.
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WITH

RAQUEL GUTIERREZ
MICHA CARDENAS

Curated by Christina Albidrez

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A QUEER YOUTH VISIBILITY PROJECT (QYVP) FUNDRAISER
The Inland Empire QYVP seeks to help local queer and trans* youth gain visibility,community, resources and empowerment through Do It Y(our)self efforts and media.

Suggested at door donation of $5

http://www.facebook.com/IEQYVP

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TIKAL BAKERY
Please support Tikal Bakery by ordering from their selection of Guatemalan bread and cuisine, before and after the event. The bakery offers a wide selection of vegan and vegetarian items. Come hungry!

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Raquel Gutiérrez (b. 1976, Los Angeles, California) cut her teeth on Los Angeles performance art when she interned and house managed at Highways Performance Space in the year 2000. Raquel is a performance writer, playwright, and cultural organizer, studied in university settings and performed in a variety of locations, like the Salvadoran countryside, cabarets, galleries, San Antonio, more universities, Pico-Union, etc. In 2001, Gutiérrez was one of the co-founding members of the performance ensemble, Butchlalis de Panochtitlan (BdP), a community-based and activist-minded group aimed at creating a visual vernacular around queer Latinidad in Los Angeles. Raquel also co-founded other queer women of color projects and Latino projects, Tongues, A Project of VIVA and Epicentro Poetry project. Raquel has published work in Ambientes: New Queer Latino Writing (edited by Lázaro Lima and Felice Picano), Los Angeles Weekly, Make/shift magazine, Journal of Chicana/Latina Studies, and Izote Vos: Salvadoran American Literary and Visual Art (published by SF’s Pacific News Service). Currently, Raquel is in the Community Scholars program through the UCLA School of Urban Planning and is also the Manager of Community Partnerships for Cornerstone Theater Company, a leader in community-based theater-making in the United States.
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Micha Cárdenas is an artist/theorist who works in performance, wearable electronics, hacktivism and critical gender studies. She is a PhD student in Media Arts and Practice (iMAP) at University of Southern California and a member of Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0. Her book The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities, published by Atropos Press in 2012, discusses artists’ strategies for using multiple realities, such as augmented, mixed and alternate reality, and the intersection of those strategies with the politics of gender, in a transnational context. She blogs at transreal.org and tweets at @michacardenas.

The Transreal book is now available!

The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities is now available on Amazon.com. I am so thrilled to say that my new book was released in February 2012. I hope you enjoy it and if you write a review, please let me know! Or if you know of a university or bookstore that would like to host an event, please comment on this post and I’ll get back to you via email. Thank you!

From the back cover:

The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities explores the use of multiple simultaneous realities as a medium in contemporary art, including mixed reality, augmented reality and alternate reality approaches. Building on the notion of “trans” from transgender, signifying the crossing of boundaries, the book proposes that transreal aesthetics cross the boundaries created by a proliferation of conceptions of reality that occurred as a result of postmodern theory and emerging technologies.

Proposing three operations for dealing with multiple realities, The Transreal discusses artists and art collectives including Blast Theory, mez breeze, Reza Negarestani, Ricardo Dominguez and Zach Blas. Through these artists’ work and Cárdenas’ own artwork, including Becoming Dragon and collaborations with Elle Mehrmand Becoming Transreal, technésexual and virus.circus, The Transreal demonstrates that transreal aesthetics have broad implications across new media, performance art and electronic literature. The book spans a wide range of genres including theoretical analyses of artworks, poetry, source code, photos of performances and wearable electronics, and discussions with leading thinkers in new media and performance art including Stelarc, Allucquére Rosanne Stone and Ricardo Dominguez.

Building on the notion of experimental affective politics that was developed in Cárdenas’ first book Trans Desire/Affective Cyborgs, co-authored with Barbara Fornssler, The Transreal claims that an understanding of building and working with multiple realities is essential for artists and political actors to have agency today.

“In this daring and poetic study, Micha Cárdenas guides us through the world of the transexual, the transgenerational, the transpolitical, the transborder. The transreal is both a multilayered space and an existential condition. Brilliant.”

Diana Taylor, University Professor, Performance Studies and Spanish, New York University

“The book itself, a provocative combination of theory, art, and autobiography, is at once a field guide, operating manual, and diary that embodies the mobile, mixed realities that it activates and describes, bringing together erotics and ethics within its calls to action.”

Jordan Crandall, Associate Professor, Visual Arts, UC San Diego

“Micha Cárdenas and her playmates are ontological guerrillas who know that blowing up the dominant order of power/knowledge is only the first step towards real revolution. The crucial next step is materializing virtual possibilities immanent in our current situation.”

Susan Stryker, Associate Professor, University of Arizona

The Place of the Personal in Art/Theory Interdisciplinary Scholarship?

repost from my HASTAC blog.

As an artist/theorist, I find myself thinking a lot lately about the place of the personal in my work, and I wonder how other HASTAC scholars and readers think about these issues.

A major part of my aesthetic as a performance artist has been a choice to place personal risk and intimacy at the core of my art practice. This choice is inspired by artists such as Carollee Schneeman, Sophie Calle, Marina Abramovic and Ulay, Linda Montano and Hannah Wilke, who have chosen to make their personal lives and the intimate relationships the subject of their work. Often, this is a feminist strategy of making the personal political. As Chris Kraus writes in I Love Dick, an intensely personal and theoretical book of memoir/fiction:

Let a girl choose death — Janis Joplin, Simone Weil– and death becomes her definition, the outcome of her “problems.” To be female till means beng trapped within the purely psychological. No matter how dispassionate or large a vision of the world a woman formulates, whenever it includes her own experience and emotion, the telescope’s turned back on her. (196)

In another part of the book, on the work of Hannah Wilke, Kraus says that Wilke’s work was focused on the question “If women have failed to make ‘universal’ art because we’re trapped within the ‘personal,’ why not universalize the ‘personal’ and make it the subject of our art?” (211)

I am very seriously interested in these questions as they pertain to scholarship and in my role as, or performance of, an artist/theorist. As I write my essay the upcoming Marxism and New Media conference at Duke, I am not sure how much, if any at all, personal experience to include. Does my role as a performance artist stop when I am writing academic papers, in the drive for legitimacy? Does personal experience and emotion somehow necessarily devalue scholarly work? As a performance artist, I am not sure if the personal cost of using my life in my work is worth the outcome, or if I would be satisfied not including my personal experience in my work.

These questions also apply to other people who create personal artwork as part of their scholarship, including poets and writers. Here I am thinking ofJeanne Jo in the iMAP PhD program at USC as well as Margaret Rhee and her current project on queer love poems. It seems queer theory in general, as well as feminist theory, has a major stake in one’s personal relationship to one’s material, as much as many scholars attempt to have an “objective” approach. How are reviewers, for journals or for tenure, supposed to be “objective” when evaluating work of mine that deals with intimate details of my life?

I find that academic frequently supports and perhaps encourages certain categories of people to do certain categories of work, like the queer people doing queer theory, indigenous people writing indigenous theory, mixed race people studying critical mixed race theory, the list goes on. What are the implications and limitations of this? Is it something we should support with our own scholarship or break away from?

Additionally, as digital media scholars and artists, the lines between personal and scholarly are often blurred in online contexts. While I could choose to do things differently, and visitor to my Flickr page may see images of my artwork or images of my personal life, and similarly with Facebook. How do you deal with these issues?

The HASTAC Community, Standards and Seeing Interdisciplinary Connections

This year, I’m a HASTAC Scholar, which means I’m blogging both on this site and on theirs. Actually, since this site is mostly for announcements, I do most of my blogging over at HASTAC nowadays. I’m posting part of this entry here to help spur more discussion about these topics.

http://hastac.org/blogs/michacardenas/2011/11/26/hastac-community-standards-and-interdisciplinarity

The recent discussion in the thread Community Standards for Virtual Spaces was spurred by, among other posts, my post of Elle Mehrmand’s performance fauxlographic. The post contained an image from the performance which contained nudity, and therefore the HASTAC site admins edited my post to remove the image and link to the UCSD Visual Art Department‘s website which is hosting the image. I wish that this wasn’t two weeks before the end of the semester and I didn’t have two papers to write, on top of conference papers, publisher deadlines and deadlines for galleries for spring shows, so that I had more time to respond. Still, I am eager to post a few thoughts in response to the very rich discussions which have taken place in the standards forum.

First, I want to state in response to Fiona’s self described “disjointed” comment, which was actually very compelling and apparently very heartfelt, that I love HASTAC. I have met some of my nearest and dearest colleagues in academic thanks to HASTAC, as well as developed sone wonderful friendships. I even met my current PhD advisor, Jack Halberstam, in the HASTAC forum on Queer and Feminist New Media Spaces. I am joining in this discussion with the best of intentions, in order to participate as a HASTAC scholar in making HASTAC as amazing, participatory and transformative as I believe it can be. I am so grateful to the HASTAC scholars, to Fiona and Cathy and everyone who makes HASTAC possible and holds open this space for artistic, academic and theoretical experimentation.

Second, I am very concerned about the suggestion that the legal Terms of Service be used as the basis for the Community Standards document. Among other things, the Terms of Service prohibits posting any material which is “offensive… vulgar, obscene, profane, or is racially, ethnically or is otherwise objectionable;… (iii) Content that is pornographic, sexually explicit or contains nudity; … Content which contains software, software viruses… links to other websites that contain Content not in compliance with the Terms of Service” These restrictions, as I understand them, could be easily interpreted to disallow Critical Code Studies discussions of software code for computer viruses, The Queer and Feminist New Media forum’s discussion of Monica Ong’s skin whitening remedy for asian women, Alexis Lothian’s vidding discussion which links to erotic (possibly pornographic) vid remixes of Battlestar Galactica, and a whole host of other very important discussions on HASTAC regarding the intersections of digital culture with art, race, gender, sex and ability and how those intersections inform our understanding of comtemporary power and social control.

The point made by John Carter McKnight is central, I think, in that the real problem here is self-policing at the risk of preventing important discussions of contemporary issues. I cited Ai Weiwei’s recent tweet saying ”if they see nudity as pornography then china is stuck in the Qing dynasty” not to be snarky, but to point to the fact that these issues are very contemporary and global. The removal of Elle Mehrmand’s poster for fauxlographic cannot be separated from the fact that her performance is about Iran and Wikileaks. Her body parts as covered or uncovered in that flyer are a direct response to the headscarves worn by Muslim women and the perception of certain types of bodies as terrorist bodies, the agency of women to choose to over or uncover themselves and the rhetorics of American exceptionalism which would present the US as a rational place of democracy in contrast to an oppressive regime which forces women to cover their bodies in order to justify military action against Iran.

By removing her flyer, HASTAC is reproducing the act of forcing women’s bodies to be covered up which Iran and other middle eastern countries are accused of as a justification for war, and doing so under a heteronormative rhetoric of protecting the children.

Read the rest at HASTAC.org

Short Interview with Riku Matsuda on KPFK

Listen to me being interviewed by Riku Katsuda on Flip the Script on KPFK!

We talked about virus.circus in the Speculative show at LACE!

Click here to listen (it’s the last 10 minutes):
http://archive.kpfk.org/parchive/mp3/kpfk_110808_200030matsuda.MP3