Upcoming and Recent Publications: Extra Terrestrial Sexuality, Queer Geographies Tijuana, Speculative and The Transreal

Sorry for the link dump, but I have been wanting to post these and haven’t had time to do so. Here are some publications I’m in that have just come out or are about to:

Encyclopedia Destructica: Extra-Terrestrial Sexuality

which was mentioned on io9!

Queer Geographies Tijuana, a new book with Lasse Lau and Felipe Zuñiga.

Speculative Catalog, get it on Lulu!

And I’m working on a new book titled “The Transreal: Aesthetics and Politics of Crossing Realities” which should be out in a few months! More on that soon!

Come see Elle and I perform in SF at Arse Elektronika!

###### monochrom’s
##### Arse Elektronika 2010
#### SPACE RACY
### Talks, machines, workshops and performances
## San Francisco, September 30-October 3, 2010
# At Chez Poulet, Center for Sex and Culture, Parisoma, Noisebridge and Mission Comics and Art

# http://www.monochrom.at/arse-elektronika/

We’re performing here:

### SCHEDULE

## Opening Night and Prixxx Arse 2010
# Hosted by monochrom’s Johannes Grenzfurthner.
With a superspecial keynote by Susie Bright (All Along the SexTower: Sex on Stage in America, from Susie Bright’s Reporters Notebook)
Featuring many guests stars, like Thomas S. Roche, Charlie Anders (Erotic mind control via the Internet) and Elle Mehrmand and Micha Cárdenas (virus.circus)
Thursday, September 30, 2010
9:00 PM at Chez Poulet (3359 Cesar Chavez, San Francisco)

and doing a workshop here:

## Screw-It-Yourself: Workshops and Unconference
# With Christophe, Maia Marinelli, E. Conrad, Elle Mehrmand, Micha Cárdenas, Zach Blas, Heather Kelley, Robert Glashüttner
Sunday, October 3, 2010
2:00 PM at Noisebridge (2169 Mission Street, San Francisco)

Read more here!

http://www.monochrom.at/arse-elektronika/

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.

//////

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.

Upgrade! Tijuana, Dec 19th and Realityshifting Pt. 3

Hola tod@s, check out my new article Reality Shifting Pt. 3, Queering New Media, discussing technesexual, and mixed reality as protocological resistance. Leave a comment!

Also, join Elle Mehrmand, Chris Head, Zach Blas, me and Dream Addictive labs on December 19th for Upgrade! Tijuana! It’s going to be awesome and is in our new location, Protolab!

Upgrade! Tijuana, Sat Dec 19th, Elle Mehrmand, Chris Head and Zach Blas

Saturday, December 19th, 2009

Upgrade! Tijuana
6-8pm
@ Protolab

Presentations by:

Zach Blas
Elle Mehrmand
Chris Head

Telefono: (0152 – 664) 686 1610 y 686 6318

Dirección: Blvd. Agua Caliente # 10535
 Edificio Gallegos  Planta
Baja.
Fracc. Aviación, Tijuana, B.C. Mexico.
C.P.22014

Poster here:
http://upgrade.dreamaddictive.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/upgrade2.jpg

and http://upgrade.dreamaddictive.com

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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,
Tijuana, Montreal, Dublin, San Diego, Long Beach, San Fransisco and
Bogotá, Colombia.

sextrument.  <2008>  performance/video
A live durational performance where I masturbated for one hour, with a
Nintendo Wii remote controller.  The accelerometer sensor in the Wii-mote
measured the speed and intensity of my hand movement, which sent messages
to MaxMSP altering the sound of my voice, which was then projected through
speakers outside of the room.  Behind a locked door, I invited viewers to
look through the peephole, seeing only the bottom of my breasts, down to
the top of my pubic line, revealing the in-between.

http://visarts.ucsd.edu/something-happening/?p=177
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Zach Blas

www.zachblas.info
is an artist and writer working at the intersections of networked media,
queerness, and the political. he is particularly interested in activist
art that addresses the methods and styles in which technologies, bodies,
and capital impact, reconstitute, and proliferate assemblages of
sexuality, gender, and knowledge, alongside the potentials and
possibilities of reshaping these assemblages as well as reconfiguring
un/human modes of agency and resistance. zach is a phd student in
literature & information science + information studies at duke university.
he holds a mfa from the design | media arts department at the university
of california los angeles, a post-baccalaureate certificate from the
school of the art institute of chicago in the art and technology studies
department, and a bachelor of science from boston university in film and
philosophy.”

zach’s current project, Queer Technologies, is an organization that
develops applications and situations for queer intervention and social
formation. Queer Technologies produces flows of resistance within larger
spheres of capitalist structurations, “identifying” and “disidentiying”
with these spheres in tandem. All pieces are designed as product, artwork,
and political tool, materialized through an industrial manufacturing
process so that they may be disseminated widely. QT products include
transCoder, a queer programming anti-language; ENgenderingGenderChangers,
a “solution” to Gender Adapters’ male/female binary; Gay Bombs, a
technical manual manifesto that outlines a “how to” of queer networked
activism; and GRID, a mapping application used to track the dissemination
of QT products and map the “battle plans” for Queer Technologies to more
thoroughly infect networks of capital. Queer Technologies’ products are
often displayed and deployed at the Disingenuous Bar, which offers a
heterotopic space for political support for “technical” problems. QT
products are also shop-dropped in various consumer electronics stores,
such as Best Buy, Circuit City, Radio Shack, and Target.
(www.queertechnologies.info)

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Christopher Head
gubbish.org

Christopher Head is a MFA candidate at the University of California San
Diego. His practice is focused on the application of experimental
technologies and art to address issues at the intersection between
virtual, public, and social spaces. Christopher’s work often engages
computer games, data visualization, and issues of software production.

Christopher’s current project and upcoming thesis exhibition (tentatively
titled “mmmo”), is an attempt to create a software framework for exploring
alternative narrative forms in interactive digital media. “mmmo” will be
released first as a pair of free/libre and open-source software libraries,
with a follow-up implementation as a development example and use-case.

Artivistic 2009 – TURN*ON

Come see Elle and my performance of Technesexual in Montreal on Oct 17th, and come participate in our Technesexual Workshop on mixed reality and live audio with DIY open hardware on all 3 days, 15-17th!

[french version follows]

please distribute // sorry for x-postings

TURN*ON
October 15 to 17, 2009
http://artivistic.org

You are invited to dress-up your pubes and play with your profiles with other sexy folks from all over the world for the upcoming fourth Artivistic gathering.

TURN*ON brings together artists (aka “Artists”), academics (“nerds”), and activists (“rebels”) who take charge of issues related to sex, technology and politics. We invite you to MAKE the world with and alongside them.

The three-day gathering will consist of workshops, films, interactive audio and visual installations, performances, actions, discussions, as well as moles and infrastructural interventions for and within our movements. We want to turn to the potency of pleasure, curiosity, humor, and desire in order to TURN*ON that which has yet to be thought and experienced differently.

Participate! Join a crew (http://artivistic.org/content/infracrews) or propose your own. Or just show up and participate in the workshops and debates. Hurry up and get in touch with us!

collaborations: info_AT_artivistic.org
infracrews: infra_AT_artivistic.org

Practicalities:

(((dollar billz)))
There is no set participation fee, but we encourage folks to engage with our peer2peer fund on the website. Autonomy is sexy!

(((accommodation)))
!mi casa es su casa! We will try to host guest in our homes as much as we can. If you can contribute to housing folks from out-of-town, we can insure you’ll get to meet exciting artists anti-capitalist style!

(((infracrews)))
Reverse Documentation (infoCrew)
Food & eating (infraBouffe)
Space / set-design + material (infraStudio)
Live blogging + net participation (infraInformationsuperhighway)
Reading circle & other nerdisms / autonomous analysis (infraNerd)
Welcome centre (infraTheatrics)
Look-out / safe space area / sexual harassment vibe watching (infraVibe)
Translation (inFranglish)
Communications / ideologico-(sub)cultural translation (infraOutreach)
Technology / Geek / Projections (infraWires)
Childcare (infraMunchkins)
et plus..!

So exciting! Pick one and bring along a friend!
Get in touch: infra_AT_artivistic.org

The schedule and venues will be announced on our website shortly.
If you think you might need childcare, pls contact us in advance.

The world to come is so sexy.
http://artivistic.org

///////////////////////////////////////En Francais
TURN*ON
15 du 17 octobre 2009
http://artivistic.org

Déguisez-vous la touffe! Joignez une infracrew et venez échanger avec nos sexy invitées venues de partout à travers le monde pour le 4ième rassemblement Artivistic.

TURN*ON réunit des artistes (nommés les « Ârtistes »), théoricien.nes (les « nerds ») et militant.es (les « rebel’ ») développant un travail qui prend prise sur des enjeux liés aux sexualités et érotismes, aux technologies et aux relations interpersonnelles. Nous vous invitons à venir FAIRE le monde avec et en même temps qu’eulles.

TURN*ON, c’est 3 jours d’ateliers, de conversations, de films, d’installations  audio et visuelles interactives, de performances, d’actions sur des enjeux sexo-politiques. Nous voulons mettre de l’avant la force du plaisir, les hardiesses de la curiosité, la puissance du désir, l’ardeur de l’humour. Prenons le pouvoir et de nos constats :
tirons des gestes.

Participez! Joignez une infracrew existante ou proposez une équipe de votre cru (http://artivistic.org/fr/content/les-infracrews). Dépêchez-vous et contactez-nous :

collaborations : info_AT_artivistic.org
infracrews : infra_AT_artivistic.org

Du côté pratique :

(((cash)))

L’événement est gratuit, mais nous vous invitons à participer à notre
caisse de solidarité en cliquant sur l’icône Pledgie de notre site web
afin de faire un don parce que l’autonomie : c’est sexy!

(((hébergement)))

!mi casa es su casa! Nous tentons d’héberger nos invité.es chez les gens
le plus que nous pouvons. Si vous pouvez contribuer en hébergeant les
participant.es à l’événement ne résidant pas à Montréal, nous vous
garantissons que vous ferez des rencontres enrichissantes : style
anti-capitaliste!

(((infracrews)))

Documentation (infoCrew)
Nourriture et repas (infraBouffe)
Espace / Mise en scène + glanage + matériel (infraSpace)
Blog en direct + manifestation internet (inframation-en-

New publication and performance at Arse Elektronika!

This compilation contains an essay I collaborated on with Sharing is Sexy, entitled “Radical Porn: Intercourse Between Fantasy and Reality”. Check it out, from ReSearch publishing! The compilation of work from last year’s Arse Elektronika includes a number of amazing essays, including a great essay on prosthetics from Karin Harasser. Also, this year at Arse Elektronika 2009, in San Francisco on October 2nd, Elle and I will be performing Technesexual, part of our series of performances titled Mixed Relations. We recently performed Technesexual in Bogota and will also be doing it Sunday at GLAMFA and in Second Life. Send me an IM in world to Azdel Slade if you want an LM