I’m Speaking at TEDx Del Mar on Sunday, April 29th
Artist/Theorist Micha Cárdenas will be speaking at TEDx Del Mar on April 29th. The theme of TEDx Del Mar 2012 is Envisioning Transhumanity. More info available at http://www.tedxdelmar.com/ .
About
A Transhuman studies conference on the future of our minds, bodies and societies, Sunday, 4/29/12 @ UCSD.
Description
We will discuss the potential promise and peril of coming technologies that will augment and radically transform our minds, bodies, and cultures. Many see these transformations as inevitable outcomes of accelerating technological development and global market conditions. The purpose of this conference is to emphasize Transhuman studies as an academic discipline, as well as establish a local community of students, scholars and entrepreneurs with the raised-consciousness and ambition to have a positive impact on our future.
We aim to discuss the following topics in a manner rigorous enough to satisfy university-educated scholars, but not so technical as to alienate the many people that are new to the subject matter:
Near and Far Cyborg World: What are the potential ramifications of visor cellphones and augmented reality, or the intimate cyborg interfaces developing across biotech, as well as in-silico life? What kinds of privacy rules should govern cellphone visors? Can there be limits preventing users from transforming the appearance of others? How are children to be safely hybridized with cyborg technologies? How will the increasing elderly react to cyborg technologies? What risks or better forms of life arise if individuality blurs when populations of cyborgs interconnect?
Current and Future Life-Enhancement: How effective is life-logging? How good are the best happiness, intelligence and fitness improvement apps and devices? What is the current state and prospects for physical and mental health enhancement technologies? What are the short term prospects for developing human potential and improving quality of life in San Diego for all groups, especially the worst-off?
Ethics, Economics, and Culture: What sociocultural and economic ramifications will transhumanist values have in the world, as well as transhuman technologies? Barring the destruction of civilization, is transhumanity inevitable?
The Market and Transhuman interests: To what degree do the market forces driving transhumanity diverge from the ends we ought to desire? What are the transhuman goals? How can we guide these transformations to optimize well being and freedom?
What is the Potential Impact of Accelerated Consciousness Raising?: How will we be changed by the explosion of knowledge and intelligence distributed between and within human minds?
Bio-Conservative Views: Are there bio-conservative arguments that haven’t been well-considered? What are the strongest arguments against human augmentation? Are there practical programs to prevent it?
Foresight in Augmentation: What’s next? Will there be a general order of development for human enhancement technologies? What are the technical limits of augmentation? What are the limits and prospects for cognitive, emotive, and empathetic augmentation?
Aging as Pathology: To what degree is it appropriate to treat aging as a single pathology? What are the prospects for life-extension, the costs, the availability, the state of the science of gene-therapy and pre-natal anti-aging interventions?
About TEDx, x = independently organized event
In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized. (Subject to certain rules and regulations.)
About TED
TED is a nonprofit organization devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. Started as a four-day conference in California 26 years ago, TED has grown to support those world-changing ideas with multiple initiatives. At TED, the world’s leading thinkers and doers are asked to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. Talks are then made available, free, at TED.com. TED speakers have included Bill Gates, Jane Goodall, Elizabeth Gilbert, Sir Richard Branson, Benoit Mandelbrot, Philippe Starck, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Isabel Allende and former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Two major TED events are held each year: The TED Conference takes place every spring in Long Beach, California (along with a parallel conference, TEDActive, in Palm Springs), and TEDGlobal is held each summer in Edinburgh, Scotland.
TED’s media initiatives include TED.com, where new TEDTalks are posted daily; the new TED Conversations, enabling broad conversations among TED fans; and the Open Translation Project, which provides subtitles and interactive transcripts as well as the ability for any TEDTalk to be translated by volunteers worldwide.
TED has established the annual TED Prize, where exceptional individuals with a wish to change the world are given the opportunity to put their wishes into action; TEDx, which offers individuals or groups a way to host local, self-organized events around the world; and the TED Fellows program, helping world-changing innovators from around the globe to become part of the TED community and, with its help, amplify the impact of their remarkable projects and activities.
For information about TED’s upcoming conferences, visit http://www.ted.com/registration
Follow TED on Twitter at http://twitter.com/TEDTalks, or on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/TED
Audio of Queer Viral Practices Panel at SXSW
The audio recording of our panel from this year’s SXSW Interactive is up. You can listen here:
http://schedule.sxsw.com/2012/events/event_IAP100223
Enjoy.
Queer Viral Practices at SXSW Interactive
I’m so happy about my first ever SXSW presentation. I’ll be performing part of my new book, The Transreal, co-written with many of my favorite artists, so don’t miss it!
reposting with slight edits from zachblas.info…
On March 9th, Zach Blas, Pinar Yoldas, and myself will give artist talks on the Queer Viral Practices in New Media Art and Theory panel at South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, TX. Please come join us if you’ll be around!
Thanks to Rhizome.org for recommending our panel!
Queer Viral Practices in New Media Art and Theory
#sxsw #queerviral
In this panel, we will focus on queer new media art and philosophy that uses and intervenes into the viral to form a radical politics of revolt and utopia. Viral will be engaged with technically, philosophically, artistically, biologically, and effectively. Our aim is to show that while viral rhetoric and discourses have marginalized and controlled queer populations, the viral remains an allusive, volatile potential that can be experimented with toward creating new queer politics and worlds. Cárdenas will discuss her collaboration with Elle Mehrmand, virus.cirus, an episodic series of performances using wearable electronics and live audio to bridge virtual and physical spaces that explores queer futures of latex sexuality amidst a speculative world of virus hysteria and DIY medicine. Blas will speak on new works from his ongoing Queer Technologies project that attempt to formulate a viral aesthetics based on a replicating difference of never-being-the-sameness against capital’s own modulating structure.
Queer Viral Aesthetics at American Studies Association in Baltimore
On our way to Baltimore this weekend!
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Performances, Workshop and Panels in September in Istanbul and Toronto
Elle and I will be presenting performances, workshops and panels in the next two weeks in Istanbul and Toronto. Read on for more details…
ISEA Istanbul: Queer Viralities: Resistant Practices in New Media Art and Philosophy
In this panel, we will focus on queer new media art and philosophy that uses and intervenes into the viral to form a radical politics of revolt and utopia. The viral will be engaged with technically, philosophically, artistically, biologically, and affectively.
Dates: Tuesday, 20 September, 2011 – 13:00 – 14:30
Chair Person: Zach Blas
Presenters: Elle Mehrmand
Micha Cárdenas
Location: Sabanci Center Room 4
Sabanci Center, Levent
The intensification and proliferation of global connectivity has opened digital networked culture to universal contagion. Indeed, it has been argued we now live in a viral ecology under the sign of viral capitalism. As viralities spread into various realms of culture, new media artists explore the viral as that which has the ability to control and restrict as well as distribute and liberate.
Our current viral ecology has opened up new tactics of resistance for various artists, activists, and cultural producers. In this panel, we will focus on queer new media art and philosophy that uses and intervenes into the viral to form a radical politics of revolt and utopia. The viral will be engaged with technically, philosophically, artistically, biologically, and affectively. Our aim is to show that while viral rhetoric and discourses have marginalized and controlled queer populations, the viral remains an allusive, volatile potential that can be experimented with toward creating new queer politics and worlds.
Blas, Cárdenas, and Mehrmand will give theoretical artist talks, and Skanse will follow with a philosophical response to the viral in media theory.
Cárdenas and Mehrmand will discuss their current collaboration virus.cirus, an episodic series of performances using wearable electronics and live audio to bridge virtual and physical spaces that explores queer futures of latex sexuality amidst a speculative world of virus hysteria and DIY medicine. Blas will speak on new works from his ongoing Queer Technologies project that attempt to formulate a viral aesthetics based on a replicating difference of never-being-the-sameness against capital’s own modulating structure. Skanse will address new directions in viral philosophy with particular concern for how this perpetual ‘movement’ of the virus is tied to notions of novelty within contemporary aesthetic discourse.
For paper abstracts and images, see:
http://isea2011.sabanciuniv.edu/panel/queer-viralities-resistant-practices-new-media-art-philosophy
ISEA Istanbul: Virtual Doppelgangers Embodiment, Morphogenesis, and Transversal Action
The session will address both artworks and theoretical frameworks that engage our replicated bodies, the affective relations they create, and transversal effects across multiple environments, platforms, and physical appearances.
Dates: Saturday, 17 September, 2011 – 13:00 – 14:30
Chair: Prof. Patrick Lichty
2nd Chair: Prof. Susan Elizbeth Ryan
Presenters: Gregory Little
Elle Mehrmand
Micha Cárdenas
Stephanie Rothenberg
In 1969 Gilles Deleuze theorized the “BwO” or Body Without Organs (in The Logic of the Sense, after Artaud’s original term). It refers to the virtual dimension of the body and its potentials, likened to the egg as site of embodiment (in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus)—a set of multiple potentialities as well as dysfunctional repetitions. In this panel we seek to explore the relations between fleshly bodies and digitized ones as sites of embodiment for our current, informatically energized existences.
From Facebook relationships to performances in Second Life, many of us experience various parts of our lives virtually today. But how are these experiences absorbed into our so-called “real lives”? In what ways do our virtual and physical spaces intersect—are they agglomerated realities (Haraway), or embedded in some ontological continuum? There have been controversies and supporting studies (esp. concerning virtual games) suggesting that excess social mediation is harmful towards our “sense of reality” and ability to interact in society. But researchers of virtual life like Nick Yee (Director of the Daedalus Project survey of MMO players) have shown that avatar experiences positively affect our physical lives and personalities. Still, new research supports old wisdom that too much virtuality is harmful toward our “sense of reality” and ability to interact in society. How are we to think about our bodies and their virtual doubles?
Artists and designers know the metaphysics of the BwO. They have created innovative ways to explore how virtual experiences can radically transform our real-world identities, as with Micha Cárdenas’s Becoming Dragon (2008); or socioeconomically impact the physical world, as did Rothenberg and Crouse’s Invisible Threads/DoubleHappiness Jeans project (2007-8). The session will address both artworks and theoretical frameworks that engage our replicated bodies, the affective relations they create, and transversal effects across multiple environments, platforms, and physical appearances.
For images and paper abstracts, see: http://isea2011.sabanciuniv.edu/panel/virtual-doppelgangers-embodiment-morphogenesis-and-transversal-action
e_fagia: Digital Event ’11: Subversive Technologies
http://www.e-fagia.org/
Curated by Arlan Londoño, with Gabriel Roldos and Federica Matelli
September 15 to October 2 of 2011
Toronto Free Gallery
1277 Bloor Street West
Toronto, ON M4E 2J8
Gallery Hours:
Wednesday-Friday 12-5pm
Saturday 12-6pm
This year’s Digital Event Subversive Technologies investigates how artists respond to communication technology as one of the major sources of power in contemporary societies. During the last few years we have seen an increase in web and electronic artists and activists that use digital tools to create an impact on their societies or to register social unrest. The artists participating in Subversive Technologies use communication, information and networking technologies as a tool to reject control society, in an attempt to liberate bodies across spaces/territories, and across social and political categories.
Digital Event’11 features three installations, as well as web art, performances and video art works by more than 20 artists from canada and abroad. The art exhibition will be presented in conjunction with conferences, workshops and live media events by artists, curators, activists and scholars from different disciplines. Some of the artists present in this event are Ricardo Dominguez, Micha Cardenas, Elle Mehrmand, No Media Collective, Alessandra Renzi, Roberta Buiani, Ulysses Castellanos, Sofia Escobar, Juan David Casas, Miguel García, Angie Bonino, Ian Paul, Nacho Duran and Balam Soto.
Opening reception:
September 15, from 6 – 9 pm
Featuring an artist talk by Ricardo Dominguez and a media installation by No Media Collective.
Artist talks:
We are proud to present Ricardo Dominguez, co-founder of The Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT), past co-director of Thing (post.thing.net), and past member of Critical Art Ensemble (CAE).
Tuesday september 13, from 7:30 – 9 pm
Auditorium, OCAD University, 100 McCaul Street, Toronto, ON, M5T 1W1
Co-presented by the Faculty of Art, OCAD University as part of Art Creates Change: The Kym Pruesse Speaker Series.
Thursday September 15, 6 – 7 pm
At Toronto Free Gallery
Live Streaming
by No Media Collective
Thursday September 15, from 6 – 9 pm
Saturday September 17, and 24, from 2 – 5 pm
Saturday October 1, from 2 – 5 pm
Performances:
Reverse Apotheosis: End of The World a performance and new media presentation by Ulysses Castellanos, Sofia Escobar and Juan David Casas curated by Gabriel Roldos from Fluid New Media Lab, New York, USA.
Saturday September 17, from 2 – 3 pm
Virus.circus.laboratory by transgender performance and new media artists Micha Cardenas and Elle Mehrmand
Saturday September 24, from 2 – 3 pm
All performances will be presented at Toronto Free Gallery
Workshops:
From Html Conceptualism to Transborder Disturbances
by Ricardo Dominguez
At 80 Gould Street, Room 202, Rogers Communications Centre Ryerson University
With the support of The Infoscape Centre For The Study Of Social Media, Ryerson University
Monday 12, Wednesday 14, and Friday 16 of September
from 5 – 8 pm
Performing The Body: Wearable Electronics, Sound And Erotics
by Micha Cardenas and Elle Mehrmand
At LIFT, Liason Of Independent Filmmakers Of Toronto
1137 Dupont Street, M6H 2A3
From Monday 26 to Wednesday 28 of September, 6 – 10 pm
Activism Beyond The Interface an itinerant production lab
by Alessandra Renzi and Roberta Buiani
At toronto Free Gallery
One day workshop and performance on October 1,
from 12 – 4 pm
On Screen:
Political Subversion, a curatorial video project presented by Federica Matelli from Liminalb, Barcelona, Spain that includes the following program:
Monography
by Angie Bonino
Saturday September 17, from 2 – 3 pm
Interferences
by Miguel García
Saturday September 24, from 2 – 3 pm
Digital Event’11 is possible thanks to the support from: Canada Council For The Arts, The Toronto Free Gallery, Tinto Coffee House, aluCine Festival And OCAD University. We would also like to acknowledge the support from the artists Ricardo Rozental, Edgardo Moreno and Rodrigo Hernandez, and all the volunteers that have made this possible
Two awesome panels in LA that I’ll be on this week!
I’m so thrilled to be able to be part of these two panels with such amazing people.
The 6th Annual Transgender Leadership Summit
Art as Activism Panel with Kalil Cohen and Wu Tsang
2:45-4:15pm
7377 Santa Monica Boulevard
West Hollywood, CA 90046
United States
Then on Thursday the panel for the Speculative show that Elle and I are in at LACE will be happening. Come and join us for a discussion of speculative art practice and its relation to political activism!
Speculative, Panel and Discussion
Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions
Thursday 28 July, 2011
7-9PM
Panel Discussion with Christopher O’Leary, Zach Blas, Jack Halberstam, Rita Raley and Jordan Crandall.
Purchase an online copy of the exhibition catalogue from Lulu here.
