Guest Lectures in Classes This Quarter and Last
Today Elle Mehrmand and I did a guest lecture on “Mixed Reality Performance from Becoming Dragon to virus.circus” in Marcela Fuentes’ “Gender and Performance” class in the Women’s Studies department at UCLA. It was a great discussion with lots of thoughtful questions from her students who came to our highways performance and read our essays.
In a few weeks I’ll be doing a guest lecture in Liz Losh’s class “Public Rhetoric and Practical Communication Online”, as part of my role as the Interim Associate Director of Art and Technology for the Culture, Art and Technology program in Sixth College at UCSD. Wow, that’s a mouthful.
Last quarter I did a guest lecture on “Live Sound Art Poetry with Puredata from Becoming Transreal to virus.circus” in Ricardo Dominguez’s class “Verbal Performance” at UCSD in the Visual Arts Department.
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
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.
Becoming Transreal: A mixed reality, biodigital performance
Performance by Micha Cárdenas and Elle Mehrmand
UCLA Freud Playhouse
November 3rd, 4pm
Co-sponsored by The Center for Performance Studies, the UCLA Department of Theater and CRCA
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. 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.
Join the Grade Strike to Drop the Charges
http://www.petitionspot.com/petitions/ucgradestrike/
Please sign the petition if you are willing to participate in a grade strike and pass the word on! In the comment section where it says “I support this petition.” please add your school and title (lecturer, professor, TA, etc)
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We are furious and so, so deeply upset seeing the videos of police brutality from UC Berkeley and UCLA:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1PuiY4Go8Y
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOI5l2_RghQ
and as if it weren’t enough, now many students are facing felony charges:
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=183824131771&ref=nf
We are willing to pledge to withhold grades until the charges against students are dropped. If you are too, please sign this petition!
With the current passage of the 32% fee increase on UC students statewide, major cuts to student enrollment, and the ongoing series of
devastating cuts and reductions to campus workers, staff and faculty. We hope that you will sign this petition and pledge to withhold grades to express our anger against the current state of public higher education in California.
We stand in solidarity with students, workers, staff and faculty organizing against the cuts at the CSU and CCC systems, and for us all to unite together in the fight to defend public higher education in California.
By signing this petition, we refuse to be complicit in tuition increases, layoffs, furloughs, the selling off of public education and the criminalization of student dissent!
WHEN YOU SIGN: Please specify YOUR UNIVERSITY AFFILIATION with your name, affiliation (undergraduate student, graduate student, worker, staff, faculty), department, and campus
Thank You!
in solidarity,
The Undersigned
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Also, check out the latest Q&A post from Anti-Capital Projects, the authors of The Necrosocial:
http://anticapitalprojects.wordpress.com/2009/11/19/anti-capital-projects/
Why No Demands?
First, because anything we might win now would be too insignificant. Countless times past student struggles have worked months and years – striking and occupying buildings and mobilizing thousands upon thousands of people – only to win back half of what they had already lost, a half that was again taken away one or two years later. But in any case, we are as yet far too small to win anything on a scale remotely close to the mildest of demands – a reduction or freeze of student fees, an end to the layoffs and furloughs. Even these demands would mean only a return to the status quo of last year or the year before – inadequate by any but the most cowardly measure. If we set our horizons higher – free education, a maximum salary differential of, for instance, 3 or 5, a university managed by faculty and students and workers – then we must realize, immediately, that nothing short of full-scale insurrection could ever achieve this. And if we were strong enough to bring the existing order tumbling down around us, why would we stop short and settle for the foregoing list?
UCLA Occupied
just putting my last few tweets here…
- rt @apophantic “We ask nothing. We demand nothing.” Tres Deleuzean http://bit.ly/3hOF01 [statement by ucla occupiers]
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rt @apophantic Police gassing protesters at UCLA outside Regents meeting
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Occupation begins at UCLA, Campbell Hall, http://bit.ly/43ZGYl
