transborderimmigranttool | micha cárdenas

New Book Chapter, SF Billboard and Glen Beck Hates Poetry

What a wonderful month! The Electronic Disturbance Theater’s new billboard for the Transborder Immigrant Tool just went up in San Francisco at the Galeria de la Raza, so if you’re in town, check it out! I LOVE the Galeria so I’m so happy to show work there!

The billboard is very timely, after Glen Beck’s big new website came out with the top story that he hates poetry and art, and myself and Ricardo. Lol! As usual, the death threats roll in after any Fox story, and after his website and TV spot, it happened like clockwork. We’ll be adding them to our flames page and our department head is making sure they get to the police. It seems like the Electronic Disturbance Theater is succeeding in creating a disturbance through media viruses.

Also, my new book chapter “I am Transreal” in the book Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation, just hit the shelves. It’s edited by Kate Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman. I’m so, so happy to be in their book, as Kate was such a huge influence on me. Thank you!!! That book is available now as of August 31st! I can’t wait to get my copy and read the rest of the essays.

Two events in NYC in July! The Next HOPE and Bluestockings

Elle and I will be heading out to NYC in July for two events we’re really excited about! First, on July 16th, Elle and I will be on a panel at the Next HOPE [Hackers on Planet Earth] conference! I’ve always wanted to go to this conference ever since I started the 2600 group in Miami with a friend as a teenager, so I’m really ecstatic to be giving a talk there. It’ll be at 2300 hours in the Lovelace room, how perfect! Here’s what we’ll be talking about:

Crisis Culture and Emergency Aesthetics in the bang.lab

How do we, as thinking people, as hacktivists and artivists, respond to crises, ecological, economic, medical, ethical? Elle Mehrmand and Micha Cárdenas of the bang.lab at UCSD will discuss a number of their projects using cheap, recycled and DIY electronics to create mixed reality performances, alternate reality performances and augmented geographies of safety. Projects to be covered include technésexual, virus.circus and the Transborder Immigrant Tool. These projects utilize biometric sensors, wearable electronics and the GPS chips in inexpensive cell phones.

Interaction with Sensors, Receivers, Haptics, and Augmented Reality

Pan, Ryan O’Horo, Micha Cardenas / Azdel Slade, Elle Mehrmand, TradeMark G. (Evolution Control Committee)

Electronic sensor technology has been increasing in resolution while decreasing in cost. The ubiquity of GPS receivers has created the ability to obtain location-based information on demand. At the same time, Augmented Reality interfaces are becoming more popular in the consumer market. From the micro-level of delicate touch sensors in haptic interfaces to the macro-level of GPS positioning, these trends make physically interactive computing more and more accessible. This session will provide an overview of motion/light/heat sensors, GPS receivers, haptic interfaces, and other interactive electronics. Along with an explanation of how they work, several projects that utilize these technologies in the consumer, creative, and social realms will be covered. There will be an audience participation section where users will get a chance to explore sensors and electronics themselves.

Friday 2300 Lovelace (90 minutes)

Then, on Saturday, I’ll be doing a talk about my new book with Barbara Fornssler, Trans Desire / Affective Cyborgs [powells] at Bluestockings books. I’ll be discussing a transgender approach to theories of desire, and its relevance for contemporary autonomous politics, looking at DIY/radical queer porn as an example of world building. It should be interesting and its my first time talking about the book publicly, so I hope people come with lots of good questions to discuss. I’ll also be performing some of the poems in the book as well, which are mostly about my transition.

Come see us Saturday in San Francisco

I’m in SF this weekend with Elle and the rest of the Electronic Disturbance Theater! We’re presenting at two great venues, so come join us!

First, Saturday June 12th, we’ll be presenting from 11:30-12:30 on a panel at the City Centered symposium on locative media, followed by a one hour “breakout session” where people can get their hands on the Transborder Immigrant Tool. Then, at 4pm, we’ll be at Galeria de la Raza. I know that Galeria de la Raza is one of the most important art spaces in SF, so I’m thrilled to be performing there. More info below…

Electronic Disturbance Theater/b.a.n.g. lab

The Transborder Immigrant Tool

Saturday, June 12, 2010 | 4:00 pm

An artist talk/conversation/presentation with Micha Cárdenas, Amy Sara Carroll, Ricardo Dominguez, Elle Mehrmand and Brett Stalbaum. Transborder Immigrant Tool (TBT) repurposes inexpensive used mobile phones that have GPS antennae. The project approximates a code-switch, a queer technology. Its software aspires to guide “the tired, the poor,” the dehydrated—citizens of the world—to water safety sites.

Transborder Immigrant Tool (TBT), a code-switch by Electronic Disturbance Theater and b.a.n.g. lab at CALIT2 at the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, enables cast-away, disposable mobile phones to function as personal safety navigation systems in the Mexican-U.S. borderlands. An artivist gesture, TBT is both powered by software that leads desert-walkers to water caches and by poetry that performatively poses the question, “What constitutes sustenance?” A return to the utopian impulses of hospitality, freedom, justice, –and the aesthetic (“Poetry is not a luxury!”), TBT kinship-diagrams Luis Alberto Urrea’s maxim for the “untimely present”: “In the desert, we are all illegal aliens.”

On Saturday, Electronic Disturbance Theater/b.a.n.g. lab members will premiere “Sustenance: A Play for All Trans[ ]Borders.”” The collectively written script, edited by Amy Sara Carroll and Ricardo Dominguez, is scheduled to be released by Printed Matter Inc. later this month.

Transborder Immigrant Tool is being exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, La Jolla, CA, and will be part of the 2010 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, CA, later this year.

For more information on this work and the project as a whole, navigate:
http://bang.calit2.net/xborder

b.a.n.g lab and the Transborder Immigrant Tool in the California Biennial

I’m extremely happy to be in this show and so proud of all my friends who also got in! Congrats everyone!

Orange County Museum of Art announces artists in the 2010 California Biennial
May 20, 2010 | 2:20 pm
The Orange County Museum of Art has selected more than 40 artists and collaborative groups to participate in the 2010 California Biennial.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/05/orange-county-museum-of-art-announces-artists-for-the-2010-california-biennial.html

The exhibition, which will run Oct. 24 to March 13, is designed to showcase new developments in contemporary art with an emphasis on emerging artists from around the state.

This year’s participants were chosen by OCMA curator Sarah Bancroft, who is curating the biennial. They represent the fields of drawing and works
on paper, film and video, large-scale installation, painting, performance and dance, photography, sculpture and text-based work.

Here’s the list of the 2010 California Biennial artists:

David Adey, Agitprop, b.a.n.g. lab, Gil Blank, Nate Boyce, Luke Butler, Juan Capistran, Zoe Crosher, Brian Dick, Dru Donovan, Mari Eastman, Carlee
Fernandez, Finishing School, Eve Fowler, Rebecca Goldfarb, Katy Grannan, Alexandra Grant, Sherin Guirguis, Drew Heitzler, Violet Hopkins, Alex
Israel, Glenna Jennings, Barry MacGregor Johnston, Vishal Jugdeo, Stanya Kahn, Andy Kolar, Jennifer Locke, Los Angeles Urban Rangers, Tom Mueske,
Tucker Nichols, Camilo Ontiveros, Nikki Pressley, Andy Ralph, Will Rogan, Paul Schiek, Taravat Talepasand, Wu Tsang, Zlatan Vukosavljevic, Nina
Waisman, Flora Wiegmann, Allison Wiese, Lisa Williamson, David Wilson, Patrick Wilson and John Zurier.

Interview on NBC about the Transborder Immigrant Tool

I don’t feel like this was really my best interview, with all the “like”‘s and the distracted glancing around, but I’m still happy that our project, the Transborder Immigrant Tool, is bringing attention to the real need for humanitarian intervention to stop the thousands of deaths sensely occurring in the desert of the US/Mexico Border. Text version of the story is here.

We’ve really been getting a ton of press since the Vice magazine interview with Ricardo, which also mentioned the Freephone project. Yet I’m consistently impressed at how the media continues to misconstrue the story. They just want to sensationalize it as much as possible and keep talking about it as if it was an app to download for an iPhone, even though we keep telling them its not that, its a phone and j2me/java application that we’re still testing and will soon be distributing in Mexico, soon being next year, hopefully.

Ricardo Dominguez, co-founder of the Electronic Disturbance Theater, also did a long interview for NPR about the Transborder Immigrant Tool, which you can hear here. The interview had a lot of people calling in who made very heated comments, as well as a discussion with the Border Patrol.

Presenting at Mobile HCI Tomorrow

Hopefully, if skype works, I’ll be presenting at the Mobile HCI conference in Bonn, Germany tomorrow morning at the Community Practices and Locative Media Workshop. I’ll be presenting a paper on the Transborder Immigrant Tool. The pdf of that paper is here and it was co-written by myself, Ricardo Dominguez, Amy Sara Carroll and Brett Stalbaum of the Electronic Disturbance Theater.

Here’s the summary:

The Transborder Immigrant Tool: Violence, Solidarity and Hope in Post-NAFTA Circuits of Bodies Electr(on)/ic

Micha Cardenas, Amy Sara Carroll, Ricardo Dominguez, Brett Stalbaum
EDT, Calit2, B.A.N.G. Lab, UCSD/Michigan

This polyvocal, collectively authored paper describes the Transborder Immigrant Tool, a border disturbance art project developed by the Electronic Disturbance Theater. The paper outlines the motivations behind the tool and elaborates a notion of Science of the Oppressed as a methodology for developing locative media projects in solidarity with social movements. A shift is identified from Tactical Media to Tactical Biopolitics in contemporary media art. Walkingtools.net is also introduced as a platform for sharing technical information about locative media projects in order to create an ecology of projects. Poetic sustenance, part of the Transborder Immigrant Tool’s functioning,is discussed in a context of Inter-American Transcendentalism.