transreal.org

Guest Lectures in Classes This Quarter and Last

Today Elle Mehrmand and I did a guest lecture on “Mixed Reality Performance from Becoming Dragon to virus.circus” in Marcela Fuentes’ “Gender and Performance” class in the Women’s Studies department at UCLA. It was a great discussion with lots of thoughtful questions from her students who came to our highways performance and read our essays.

In a few weeks I’ll be doing a guest lecture in Liz Losh’s class “Public Rhetoric and Practical Communication Online”, as part of my role as the Interim Associate Director of Art and Technology for the Culture, Art and Technology program in Sixth College at UCSD. Wow, that’s a mouthful.

Last quarter I did a guest lecture on “Live Sound Art Poetry with Puredata from Becoming Transreal to virus.circus” in Ricardo Dominguez’s class “Verbal Performance” at UCSD in the Visual Arts Department.

somatic SENSOR, Jan 21, 22 at Highways Performance Space

somatic SENSOR
Curated by Elle Mehrmand, Micha Cárdenas and Dino Dinco
January 21st and 22nd, 2011, 8:30pm
Highways Performance Space and Gallery

Emerging out of queer experience, the works in somatic SENSOR move along lines of flight exploring desire, technology, the erotic and the viral. Rejecting control society to find new forms of relationality, somatic SENSOR includes performances, digital and networked media, drawing and soft sculpture to open borders between realities and bodies. This show features the work of Zach Blas, Robert Crouch, Micha Cárdenas, Dino Dinco, Dawn Kasper, Frankie Martin, Elle Mehrmand, Zac Monday, Yann Novak, Phil Skaller, Samuel White, Dorian Wood, and Suzanne Wright.

Highways Performance Space and Gallery
@ the 18th Street Arts Center
1651 18th Street
Santa Monica, CA 90404

Admission is $15, $10 for students

becoming transreal [poster], a mixed reality, biodigital performance at UCLA on Nov3rd

Performance by Micha Cárdenas and Elle Mehrmand in collaboration Chris Head
UCLA Freud Playhouse
November 3rd, 4pm
Co-sponsored by The Center for Performance Studies, the UCLA Department of Theater and CRCA
Panel after the performance at 5pm with Sandy Stone, Amy Sara Carroll and Ricardo Dominguez

What if you could become anything? What happens after species change surgery becomes a reality? becoming transreal speculates on a future in which the promises of bionanotechnology have become realized, and yet as capitalism has continued to fail, both the interiors of our bodies and the virtual world have become totally commodified. you can become anything, but to finance your whims of identity transformation, the same nanohormones that transform your body are also producing drugs for others. becoming transreal looks at transgender experience through a lens of slipstream science fiction poetry about bio-nano drug piracy. The performance uses motion capture to interface with Second Life avatars and 3D stereoscopic imagery to immerse the audience in this transreal world.

Inspired in part by Tales from the Matter Market and a continuation of Becoming Dragon, this performance asks what our lives are like when we have become both the factory and the product, asks how we can resist capitalism when neoliberalism’s collapse has wound itself into the perfection of a single atom, into the fabric of beauty and into our most intimate emotions. In becoming transreal, Cárdenas and Mehrmand will use devices sold both for quasi-medical purposes and for sexual pleasure, part of the economies of medicalized sexuality, the grey area of “elective” medical products and medical play sex toys, to make visible the pain of transition.

Co-sponsored by the Department of Theater, the School of Theater, Film, and Television, LGBT Studies, the Center for the Study of Women and The Center for Research in Engineering, Media and Performance. Additional support provided by San Diego State University’s Second Life Initiative, Aztlan Island.

This event is free and open to the general public.

Come see Elle and I in Perform! Now!

July 29th to August 1st , Chinatown will play host to the second annual Perform! Now! Festival. Upwards of 40 performances will take place inside and outside a variety of venues in Chinatown. Painstaking efforts have been made in the programming to ensure appropriate focus, time, context and space to allow for uninterrupted engagement with large audiences, and provide the best possible arena for each.

Expanding on the premise of the inaugural event, this summer’s festivities will seek to further develop and explore the delicate relationship between Performer, Audience, and Environment. Los Angeles historic Chinatown district harbors many unusual and exciting areas with limitless performance potential, that when paired with the wealth of talent included in this year’s roster should provide for a delightful and energizing festival.

Participating Artists include:

Skip Arnold, Math Bass, Micha Cardenas and Elle Mehrmand, Mariel Carranza, Marcus Civin, Dorit Cypis, Megan Daalder, Alexis Disselkoen, Zackary Drucker, Fundación Wanna Winni, Brian Getnick and Kristian van der Heyden, Liz Glynn and Corey Fogel, Douglas Green, Matt Greene, Micol Hebron, Gustavo Herrera, Marc Horowitz, ing, Vishal Jugdeo/Aram Moshayedi/Matteo Tannat, Joel Kyack, Emily Mast, Yong Soon Min, Lucas Murgida, Warren Neidich, Paul Pescador, Nancy Popp, Andrew Printer, Jules Rochielle, Margie Schnibbe, Sister Mantos, Alex Staiger, Team Zatara, Julie Tolentino, Jason Triefenbach, Samuel Vasquez, Dorian Wood and Joseph Tepperman… Material Press Presents The Oratorium featuring Farrah Karapetian, Jason Underhill, Susan Silton, Ellen Birrell, Ginny Cook, Dee Williams, Dan Hockenson, Daniel Lucas Guimaraes, Kim Schoen, Olivia Booth, and Wendy Mason… Two days of sound performances curated by Volume… plus more acts to come…

Participating Venues Include:

The Box
The Company
Francois Ghebaly Gallery
Dan Graham
The Happy Lion
Human Resources
Charlie James Gallery
Jancar Gallery
Parker Jones
Kunsthalle LA
Sabina Lee Gallery
Pepin Moore
Tom Solomon Gallery
SolwayJones
Via Cafe
WPA
… and more…

virus.circus.breath video and photos

virus.circus.breath from azdel slade on Vimeo.

For your protection and the protection of others, you may be asked to wear a mask.

The virus must be contained.

Performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, at the Here, Not There performance night.

Alternate reality performance with latex, wearable electronics, lilypad arduinos, conductive fabric, conductive thread, soft sensors, lilypad Xbee wireless transmitters, ultrasonic rangefinder.

elle mehrmand and micha cárdenas

More at transreal.org and elleelleelle.org

Stills at flickr.com/photos/lotu5/sets/72157623782952247/

Photography by Ash Smith.

Code and technical details here: transreal.org/2010/06/25/virus-circus-source-code-and-technical-info/

virus.circus source code and technical info

virus.circus is a collaboration between elle mehrmand and micha cárdenas. It is an episodic alternate reality performance involving latex outfits, wearable electronics, lilypad arduinos, conductive fabric, conductive thread, a fabric pressure sensor sensors and an ultrasonic rangefinder to create live audio and to bridge virtual and physical spaces. The performances explore possible queer futures of latex sexuality amidst a speculative world of virus hysteria.

For photos of the electronics see the flickr set.

Recent episodes in the virus.circus series of performances involve using an ultrasonic rangefinder and a pressure sensor sewn to a lilypad arduino. [thanks to Hannah Perner-Wilson for the amazing pressure sensor instructable] The lilypad sends data over Xbee wireless tansmitters to a Puredata patch which creates a live audioscape from our voices, modulated based on the state of the rangefinder and a pressure sensor. This data is sent from Puredata out to a text file which is read by a modified version of the Second Life Viewer 2. This custom client reads the distance from the local file and updates the position in world of two objects which our avatars sit on, with custom animation overriders to replace the sit animations with the animations we have chosen. Since SL viewers can connect to Opensim and OSgrid, this patch should also work fine for moving Opensim avatars with arduino sensors.

Attached to this page you can find the pd patch and the Second Life Viewer 2 patch. I’ll also include them below. The pd patch is based on code from William Brent, Daniel Arias and Tom Erbe who ported Tom’s soundhack plugins to pd. This isn’t the cleanest patch, but it does allow you to control an avatar in Second Life from Pd through a local file, eliminating the overhead of using llHttpRequest which can add seconds of delay. This is a continuation of work I began thinking about with an earlier project, Becoming Dragon. The pd patch requires pd-extended, because it relies on its comport object. It reads data from two different comports, as in our performance one arduino was sewn into elle mehrmand’s latex outfit and attached to a pressure sensor, which transmitted to an arduino connected to a single usb port, and another arduino was sewn into my bra with the ultrasonic rangefinder attached. Images of these electronics are in the flickr set, but we’ll add more detail shots soon.

This video shows the Second Life avatar movement clearly, but I added averaging to make it smoother: http://vimeo.com/12219412

pd-to-sl-llappviewer.cpp.diff

viruscircus-breath.pd

So as not to clog up this blog with code, see the attached patch (diff file) for the Second Life code, or see this wiki page:

http://banglabinexile.pbworks.com/viruscircus-source-code-and-technical-info