Micha Cárdenas, Lecturer in Visual Arts and Critical Gender Studies and Elle Mehrmand, bang.lab artist/researcher , to Perform virus.circus at Opening Night of Arse Elektronika Festival in San Francisco
virus.circus is an episodic series of performances using wearable electronics, soft sensors and live audio to bridge virtual and physical spaces. The series explores possible queer futures of latex sexuality amidst a speculative world of virus hysteria.
More about virus.circus:
http://vimeo.com/12863207
About Arse Elektronika:
http://www.monochrom.at/arse-elektronika/
Arse Elektronika San Francisco: SPACE RACY
Conference, film festival, machines, workshops and performances
September 30-October 3, 2010
Love hotels. Swinger club design. Phallic architecture. The gentrification of Times Square, kicking out all the peep shows, and similar anti-sex gentrifications and battles. Kids making out in the back seats of cars, and people fucking in parks. Housing for unconventional family units. Augmented reality sex spaces. Furniture for sex. Room design. Creating new environments. Gendered spaces, and gender in the creation of space. Architecture by women, and the potential for the construction of a feminist architecture. Actively gender-segregated spaces, as both empowering and oppressing. Queer-segregated spaces, similarly. The acts of human intimacy, sexual intercourse, and procreation in weightlessness and the extreme environments of space. Erotic space tourism. The visibility of sex, genders, and relationship structures in various spaces. Spaces of sexual control and permissiveness. Sexual subcultures as spaces of social division. Spatial enforcement of relationship structures and gendered power structures. Geotagging as an expression for kinks. The sexual reading of architecture, especially around historical and modern styles and concerning ornament and detail. The eroticization of buildings — architecture for whorehouses, the Las Vegas strip, people who want to sleep with buildings. What makes design “sexy” and the construction of “sexy” as an architectural category as a comment on late heteronormativity. The terabyte gloryhole. The space in which the male gaze occurs and the space it defines.
Heterosexism, misogyny, and heterocentrism reinforce the dominant cultural structure and contribute to the oppression of large sectors of society. Sexuality, sex, gender, and related constructs are heavily implicated in and reproduce space, and are also constrained and restricted by it and by heterosexism. Let’s explore this space of interactions.
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San Diego State University’s Visiting Artists on Aztlan Island in Second Life, Elle Mehrmand and Micha Cárdenas
http://sdsu-aztlan.wikispaces.com/
Elle Mehrmand and Micha Cárdenas/Azdel Slade will be Visiting Artists in Residence during the 2010/10 academic year. Micha and Elle bring a
wealth of expertise in 3D, augmented-reality design, artistry, performance and theory-making.
Micha is an artist/theorist whose work spans from erotic mixed reality performance in motion capture studios to dislocative border disturbance art in remote desert areas, always striving to identify limits and challenge them. Her transreal work mixes physical and networked spaces in order to explore emerging forms of queer relationality, biopolitics and DIY horizontal knowledge production. Micha received her MFA from University of California, San Diego, her MA in Media and Communications from European Graduate School, and her BS in Computer Science from Florida International University. She teaches in the Visual Arts and Critical Gender Studies Departments at UCSD, and performs regularly. Follow her blog http://transreal.org or Twitter http://twitter.com/azdelslade for updates on her performances.
Elle Mehrmand is a performance/new media artist and musician who uses the body, electronics, video, photography, sound and installation within her works. She is the singer and trombone player of Assembly of Mazes, a music collective who create dark, electronic, middle eastern, rhythmic jazz rock. Elle is currently an MFA candidate at UCSD, and received her BFA in art photography with a minor in music at CSULB. Elle has received grants from UCIRA and Fine Arts Affiliates. She is a researcher at CRCA and the b.a.n.g. lab at UCSD. Her performances have been shown in Los Angeles, Long Beach, San Diego, Tijuana, Bogotá, Dublin and Montreal.
