virus.circus.probe // 5 min excerpt // somatic SENSOR, Highways Performance Space
virus.circus.probe // 5 min excerpt // somatic SENSOR, Highways Performance Space from micha cardenas on Vimeo.
…testing for viral contamination…
…due to recent viral outbreaks, protective latex barriers must be worn at all times…
…the hysteria is everywhere…
…touching, and illness, are prohibited by law…
…skin to skin contact may result in viral contamination…
virus.circus is an episodic series of performances exploring possible queer futures of latex sexuality and DIY medicine in resistance to a speculative world of virus hysteria. The performances use wearable electronics, soft sensors and live audio to bridge virtual and physical spaces. The history of queer politics shows that the rhetoric of viruses such as HIV are used to control marginalized populations, while the present transnational politics of viruses such as H1N1 unearth the militarization of medical authority, microscopic migrations and global inequities.
…For your protection and the protection of others, you may be asked to wear a mask…
…The virus must be contained…
Code switching between mixed and alternate reality, virus.circus asks how we can use reality as a medium, resonating across a number of modes including public space interventions, performances in museums and galleries and networked performances. Wearable sensors allow the performers to experiment with transreal embodiment, performing with their physical bodies and Second Life avatars simultaneously.
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elle mehrmand // http://elleelleelle.org
micha cárdenas // http://transreal.org
videography by frankie martin
performed at somatic SENSOR
highways performance space
santa monica, california
january 2011
Review of Becoming Transreal by Linzi Juliano
From Linzi Juliano at the Center for the Study of Women at UCLA:
“What if you could become anything? What happens after species-change surgery becomes a reality?” These questions open Micha Cárdenas’ blog post advertising announcing her november 3rd event at UClA, entitled “becoming transreal.” This piece is a continuation of “becoming dragon,” a 365-hour piece referencing the 365 days of “real-life experience” a transgender or transsexual person must live through before beginning hormone therapy and/or undergoing a sex-change operation. Hosted by the Center for Performance studies and cosponsored by the Center for the study of Women, “becoming transreal” also exposed relationships among various technologies of the body, from hormone therapy to online role-playing games…
Watching her breasts being pumped into being (a technique used to encourage breast growth for transsexuals) elicited a visceral reaction in some of the audience members: an older male twisted and grabbed protectively at his own breasts…
Cárdenas wore a bra, underwear, high heels, and a virtual reality headset. Her partner, Elle Mehrmand, was also a very visible and integral part of the performance, coordinating avatars on screen and running sound. While Cárdenas flatly read facts about her mother’s illness, her own hormone therapy, the promises of virtual communities and newfound lesbianism, Mehrmand inserted sound effects and repeated certain words and sounds into a microphone, thereby emphasizing them for both audiences. This echolalia, as panelist Amy sara Carroll later noted, added to an atmosphere of the transreal because the voices blended and overlapped each other in varied forms.
Read the rest at:
http://www.csw.ucla.edu/publications/newsletters/2010-2011/article-pdfs/DEC2010_Linzi.pdf
Watch the video at vimeo.com/azdelslade
Gaming Subcultures, Farmville and Minecraft, Second Life and Opensim
This month on the Empyre list has been really interesting, so much so that I couldn’t help but jump in. Gabriel Menotti introduced the topic in the beginning of December saying:
Welcome to an early December and another debate! This month, empyre is dedicated to the general universe of Gaming Subcultures – the different forms of “playing outside the console,” titles that explore such dynamics and, especially, the social practices built around them.
Here were some of my replies:
This is an exciting topic, but in my late night tiredness the most I can do is throw out a few brief things that came to mind…
2010/11/29 Julian Raul Kücklich:
> 2. Subcultural Networks
> Another mythological foundation of computer game culture can be found in the
> development of “Colossal Cave / Advent”, which was allegedly only possible
> because Don Woods got in touch with Will Crowther through the new medium of
> email, sending messages to every server on the net in the mid-1970s (see
> http://www.rickadams.org/adventure/a_history.html). True or not, this story
> draws attention to the fact that computer gaming was relegated to an
> academic elite for a long time.
At a recent event at UCSD/Calit2 called CRCA Exchange, Jeremy Douglass talked about his research into interactive fiction and the film Get Lamp. In that discussion I was reminded of how early text adventures also paralleled early online communities like MOO’s, which of course prefigure today’s virtual worlds like WoW and SL. In my discussions with philosopher Sandy Stone during Becoming Dragon, she criticized graphical MMO-worlds of today for their limited offerings of embodiment. While it’s feasible to spend time and money to be a dragon in Second Life or a night elf in Wow, in a MOO it’s only a matter of creativity of language to embody a cloud of smoke or a body of fire or have a character that is a beam of light.
> 4. Skins, Maps, and Mods
> It seems almost ironic that early 3D games like Doom and Quake managed to
> start a revolution in fan-created game modifications, while at the same time
> sounding the death knell for bedroom coders. The complexity and size of 3D
> games required much larger teams, so it was no longer feasible to create
> games by yourself. At the same time, however, id’s laissez-faire approach
> allowed gamers to create their own maps, skins and mods for their games.
some personal favorites:
everything by Anne Marie Schleiner:
http://www.opensorcery.net/velvet-strike/
and the PMS skins for Quake II by PMS’ Georgina from “Parasitic Interventions: Game Patches and Hacker Art”
http://www.opensorcery.net/patchnew.html
and Adam Killer by Brody Condon is one of the most elegant and moving game mods I’ve ever seen:
https://wiki.brown.edu/confluence/display/mcm1700n/Game+Mods+-+A+Different+Sort+of+Play
Also, I still think that Simon’s comment is very relevant. Personally, what’s interesting to me is the ways that games reflect larger social dynamics, the ease with which people replace the mythopoetic rules that govern their daily interactions in society with the new rules of video games. I’m also very interested in non-competitive games, such as those of Boal and Theater of the Oppressed, and the ways that they can be so infinitely interesting to people despite the presence of violence and competition. Hopefully game cultures such as Independent Games can represent a rise in new possibilities of games outside of the male/military/capitalist drives that motivate commercial game development today. I personally find developments such as OpenSim to be much more exciting and hold the potential for us to move beyond the corporate confines of worlds like Second Life.
Here’s an independent game that i find fascinating:
http://tale-of-tales.com/TheEndlessForest/
and here’s something to make you smile, and an interesting example of gamer created content that is highly political, supporting with Wikileaks in Second Life:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/zemoo/5245993333/
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> But: is it fruitful to pin this down? Does it make any sense to ask
> these questions? Instead of thinking of games as objects, shouldn’t we
> be appropriating them as tools and means to explore the contexts in
> which they are inserted, just like David Griffith says Naked on Pluto
> does with Facebook privacy politics?
>
> And how can a game be critical of its own platform, if not by taping
> into even lower underpinnings and conventions – ethics, aesthetics,
> legality? Ideologies? Culture itself?
Hi Gabriel,
I like the direction of these questions a lot. In my own mixed reality work with second life and opensim, and thinking of other’s work with World of Warcraft, it seems that the gaming platform functions more as a medium than as an object or a relation. I appreciated Domenico’s reference to My Generation as I’ve been very influenced myself by the Mattes’, and Eddo Stern’s work, such as Portal, Sheik Attack and Tekken Torture Tournament have been very influential for me. For me, working in Second Life led to a broader interest in using reality as a medium, branching out into alternate reality projects [virus.circus: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lotu5/sets/72157623782952247/] and as a means to facilitating slipstream science fiction scenarios [becoming transreal: http://vimeo.com/16869351].
An ongoing issue I’ve faced is that people at times see my work as some sort of endorsement of Second Life, where myself and my collaborator Elle Mehrmand both see it as revealing both the potentials and the limitations of virtual worlds. In particular the community of Second Life users seem largely in favor of work that is more technical, as in Hyperformalism, and that focuses on promoting the platform, which is also frustrating. Other groups like Second Front have also inspired me, and I think do an amazing job of both using Second Life as a medium and engaging with the particular ethics and grammars of it as a medium. Here I’m thinking specifically of their performance 28 Avatars Later [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gByuAUcehrI ] which confronted the beauty and vanity of Second Life users with a viral zombie outbreak.
But personally, where Elle and I are at now is more thinking about leaving second life behind and focusing on other modes of alternate and mixed reality. It often feels that in artistic contexts and outside of them it’s very hard to escape the baggage of a particular platform. The perception of our work is too bound, for us, to Second Life itself, despite our attempts to use it as one element in a larger performative matrix including live sound, biometrics, motion sensors and live queer erotics. Perhaps this is particular to the usage of games in a performative mode, though… Also, after a year of working on research into Opensim with the UCSD School of Medicine, it seems that Opensim, the free software alternative to Second Life is still not very appealing as a platform or a medium for making work. It seems that so much of Second Life is driven by commerce, as in builders making avatars, environments and clothing, that they have been unable to draw much of an audience to OpenSim, possibly because of the lack of an audience or the very alpha state of the commerce engine.
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> “So vis-a-vis established gaming culture, social games are the new
> punk rock: easy to produce, with much more emphasis on “spreadability”
> than gameplay, and reaching out to audiences who would never pay 60
> euros for a AAA console game.” [Julian Kücklich]
>
> I like very much this reading of the situation, as counter-intuitive
> as it may seem. It also shows that the way these games operate
> prevents them from becoming a counter-culture by default. Farmville
> players must comply not only to the game rules, but also with those of
> its platforms of distribution (e.g. Facebook) as well, right?
Hi,
I have to say I’m with Simon on this one. I think that to see Farmville as punk rock is ridiculous, since it’s a huge profit seeking corporation, with $500,000 in profit already and a projected worth of billions.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/business/25zynga.html?pagewanted=all
http://venturebeat.com/2010/02/18/zynga-farmville-sharespost-mafia-wars/
Though I’ve never played it, my niece apparently loves it…
I do think that Minecraft could be seen as way more punk rock, though. It seems to be something fun the developer wanted to do and it seems pretty pointless in a way similar to some punk bands I think of as just a pure expression of emotion. Also, the simple aesthetics of just using blocks is brilliant and allows a whole field of expression to develop out of a narrow set of constraints, again like punk. [ http://www.minecraft.net/ ]
But in terms of being oppositional, I think that D. Fox Harell and his lab are doing brilliant work that brings into question the dominant paradigms of race, gender and identity in gaming. [ http://icelab.lcc.gatech.edu/ ] A recent interview with him on Kotaku responded in a huge backlash from gamers who perceived their subculture as being critiqued, which I think just indicates the accuracy and relevance of the critique he’s making, based on his own experiences with games like Elder Scrolls, Neverwinter Nights and Guild Wars. [ http://kotaku.com/5523384/identity-and-online-avatars-a-discussion] Certainly gamers are very eager to jump to the defense of their own subculture. I find both Chamelonia and Loss Undersea to be two of my favorite projects of his, both dealing with avatars in transition and the skill of oppressed people of adaptation, in the spirit of chela sandoval’s methodology of the oppressed, both are very poignant and clever, as well as the DefineMe: Chimera facebook app.
Directions to Becoming Transreal, Today at 4pm PST/SLT
Go here in Second Life to see Becoming Transreal!
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Odyssey/232/31/601
In “Real life” come see the full mixed reality event with 3D stereoscopic projection and motion capture at the UCLA Freud Playhouse. Directions here
At 5pm afterwards we will have a discussion about the performance with Sandy Stone, Amy Sara Carroll and Ricardo Dominguez. The panel will address the issues form the performance, including the ways that digital transformation facilitates other transformations, the future potentials for gender and gender politics, the internalization of power and capital which is furthered by nanotechnology, and the interface between the medical system and politics, either how we are implicated in the medical system or how medical technologies facilitate our lives or both.
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.
Mixed Reality Performance in San Francisco and Visiting Artists on Aztlan Island at SDSU
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.