Autonet is a project to create a wireless, global internet that can provide more reliability than corporate phone companies by being community based and freely licensed.

The cutting off access to The Pirate Bay by BT in the UK is just another sign of the beginning of the end. The fact that the Great Firewall of China exists signals that the internet is already obsolete and that the Great Firewall of the US is just around the corner. While moves against net neutrality began years ago and have been fought, nasty laws such as HR4437 and the Total Information Awareness program have a way of coming into existence later in the future, slightly modified, under different names. The internet as we know it, as a place for free exchange of information, as the center of what has been called a second 17th century with new ideas, creativity and innovation emerging daily, is rapidly coming to an end. We must use these last gasps of freedom to route around the disaster and create a truly free network.

How? Advances in wireless technology such as ubiquitous wireless routers, community mesh networks which are easily expandable and self-healing as well as long range wireless efforts such as HPWREN indicate a possible future for a community based internet free of the centralized control of telephone corporations and governments. While this is definitely a fork, more forks are to come and we can only hope that a few networks will emerge which can be broad enough to span most of the globe.

Major questions remain to be solved, such as speed issues, routing issues, DNS control, splits and neutrality. The Autonet, or Autonomous Internet project seems to begin to address this rapidly changing situation, where today Germany has installed internet filtering as well and more countries are to come. While today those cut off are defying copyright laws, tomorrow any other political issue may be the cause for being denied access to global networks. While today the FBI is content to steal servers from information providers like Indymedia, perhaps tomorrow they will not be happy until indymedia is completely cut off of the network, or other open sources of information such as blogs, twitter accounts and social networks of dissident groups.

The popular revolt in Iran and subsequent disruption of network access by the Iranian government is only a glimpse of what is to come in the US and around the world, where the first line of attack against political resistance is to cut off network access. By establishing a community based, wireless, global network we can allow groups of individuals, not corporations, to maintain freedom of communication; We can create out right to communicate instead of asking for it, and continue to route around obsolete intellectual property laws which restrict our dreams and our creativity. Join this effort by going to http://alt-bit.org and contributing to this research, lets start outlining the problems, finding the technical solutions and work out the issues, collectively, as a Free Software / Open Hardware project, using open licensing.

Another urgent reason for Autonet is one that has motivated Free Software hackers for so long: Technological progress without a reliance on corporate support. Given the current financial and economic crises, how long can we expect dinosaurs like phone companies to survive? If one of these crises turns into disaster, the consequence is likely to be the disruption or collapse of the global networks on which we rely. I am not ready to give up what has been gained from these networks, including a worldwide communication between political actors empowered through fast information flows. We must start this long, difficult project today so that we may be ready for unexpected dangers which threaten our capability to communicate as a multitude, globally.

To add to the project, go to http://trac.alt-bit.org/wiki/projects/autonet

To sign up to participate, go to http://trac.alt-bit.org/register

-djlotu5

-chead

its true, i’m back on twitter. morally sullied, oh well, screw purity! up with impurity! perhaps postmodernism and global capital always require a degree of strategic compromise or tactical manouvering through identities to allow for resistance to be effective…

subscribe to my feed here: http://twitter.com/lotu5

and its still going to identi.ca as well, here http://identi.ca/djlotu5 thanks to http://ping.fm

and if you’re someone i’ve been nagging to get on twitter or identica, make sure you set up your cell phone to work with it, thats mostly the point! and you can update your facebook status through twitter, to send to both at the same time using ping.fm.

i just have to point out that twitter is totally corporate coopted, i’ve seen microsoft twitter ads this week and its on the cover of time magazine with a tweet to buy more magazines. awful. but hey, maybe i can keep in touch with friends and fam over the summer this way! it seems like most people don’t have time for phone calls anyway…

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

What: Slapshock Performance by Elle Mehrmand and Micha Cardenas at Compactspace

Where:  Compactspace
105 E 6th St
Los Angeles, CA 90014

When: Thursday, June 11th, 8pm

Contact: Elle Mehrmand, ellemehrmand A+ gmail [d0t) com
Micha Cardenas, mcardenas a+ ucsd d()+ edu
Compactspace, 626-676-0627

Slapshock is a performance using a Freeduino and an Arduino to create a pain sharing device. The performance, by CRCA researcher Elle Mehrmand and Calit2 researcher and Experimental Game Lab member Micha Cardenas, is an exploration of symbiotic relationality through pain, in which each performer slaps themself in turn causing the other performer to receive a painful electric shock.

The devices were created by Mehrmand and Cardenas using a Freeduino, an Aruino, piezo sensors and Transdermal Electro Nerve Stimulation (TENS) units. Mehrmand and Cardenas soldered the components together and programmed the microcontrollers to detect a slap through the piezo sensor and activate the TENS units when the slap occurs.

The performance is one of a series studies for “mixed relations”, a larger set of performances using technology to explore intersubjective relationships between people as well as between people and technology. “mixed relations” will involve two performers in mixed reality environments using their bodies as instruments to produce live audio, and will take place in the Fall of 2009.

Slapshock will be performed as part of The Dark Tower, a group show of UCSD MFA candidates and recent graduates curated by Cauleen Smith. The performance will be at the Compactspace gallery during the LA Artwalk on June 11th, 2009.

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 creates 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. She has shown works in Los Angeles, Long Beach, San Diego and Tijuana.

Micha Cardenas / dj lotu5 is a transgender artist, theorist and trouble
maker. Micha holds an MFA from UCSD, an MA in Media and Communications
with distinction from the European Graduate School and a Bachelor’s
degree in Computer Science from Florida International University. She
is a researcher at the Experimental Game Lab at the Center for Research
in Computing and the Arts and at CalIT2. Her interests include the interplay of
technology, gender, sex, desire and biopolitics. Micha recently
joined the Lui Velazquez space in Tijuana as a curator and collective
member. Her artwork has been exhibited internationally at museums,
galleries, conferences, community spaces and public spaces. Micha blogs
at TechnoTrannySlut.com

More information about “mixed relations” can be found at:
http://bang.calit2.net/tts/2009/05/01/mixed-relations-won-the-ucira-emerging-fields-award/

More information about The Dark Tower show at Compactspace:
http://www.compactspace.com/the-dark-tower/

#

Watch my talk today at 11:30am PST/SLT entitled “Becoming Dragon: An Epstemology of Transition” here: http://www.pactac.net/stream.html

As well as the rest of the amazing talks in the workshop in the next few days!

keep an eye on my identica feed in the next few days as i’ll be in victoria, british columbia for the next few days at Ctheory’s Critical Digital Studies workshop!

I’m presenting a paper called “Becoming Dragon: Epistemology of Transition”, about my recent performance and the implications of considering the subject in transition as the subject of knowledge. I plan to post a lot of the writing I’ve done about Becoming Dragon online soon. The day I get back I have to hand in my printed, bound catalog for graduation, and I expect that I’ll post the pdf of it online soon after. I’m looking for a publisher for it, as its over 100 pages, but if I don’t find one, I’ll probably publish it with lulu.com…

Wow, this is deeply disturbing and just another thing on the list with the bulldozing of Friendship Park in order to finish the triple fence that border activists should be concerned with. While there has been some attention put towards ending detention centers in the US, this is one of the most disturbing detention stories I’ve ever read. I wonder how many of these psychiatric dtention centers exist throughout the US and Canada?

http://sdcitybeat.com/cms/story/detail/a_little_guantanamo/8089/

‘A little Guantanamo’

Attorney finding it difficult to investigate treatment of mentally ill detainees

By Kelly Davis

Ann Menasche should be able to walk into any psychiatric facility at any time to investigate allegations of neglect and abuse. All the disability-rights attorney needs is probable cause. Except, it seems, when the allegations involve patients held by the federal government for allegedly violating immigration laws.

For the last several weeks, Menasche, an attorney with Disability Rights California, has tried unsuccessfully to get into Alvarado Parkway Institute (API), a La Mesa psychiatric hospital, to interview mentally ill detainees who’ve been sent there because staff at federal detention facilities, like the Otay Detention Facility, can’t adequately care for them. Menasche was given a formal tour of the facility on March 6—she could see detainees but not speak with them. When she submitted a request to return to API to interview specific patients, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official told her she needed to give 72 hours advance notice and submit what’s known as a G-28 form—a form immigration attorneys whose services have already been retained are required to file.

Disability Rights California’s interest in talking to detainees is “wholly unrelated to immigration,” Menasche wrote in a May 5 letter to ICE lawyers. In the letter, Menasche pointed out that ICE was imposing on her requirements that went beyond the agency’s own policies: “Attorneys representing detainees on legal matters unrelated to immigration are not required to complete a Form G-28,” she quoted from ICE visitation standards.

“I want to talk to everybody, and at this rate, I’m not getting very far,” Menasche said in a May 14 interview with CityBeat.

ICE spokesperson Lauren Mack said in a written statement that officials requested the 72-hour notice because the medical condition of the two detainees Menasche wished to speak with was “unstable.”

“ICE officials requested of the attorney up to 72 hours to work with the API staff to accomodate the visit while ensuring it would not adversely impact the detainees’ recovery and treatment they were receiving,” Mack said.

“By the time 72 hours was up, they were back at Otay,” Menasche said. “So, if they were so unstable, they certainly recovered rather quickly.”

On Monday, Menasche learned that one of those detainees, whom she’d recently interviewed at the Otay Detention Facility, had been deported. The detainee had been sent to API for refusing to eat and angrily described to Menasche having to spend 25 days at the psychiatric hospital shackled to a bed. Menasche immediately faxed a letter to API’s CEO, Patrick Ziemer, letting him know she’d be conducting an inspection of the hospital on Wednesday, May 20.

What Menasche’s seen for herself—and officials have confirmed—is that each detainee sent to API is shackled to a bed 24 hours a day and monitored by two armed guards. They are kept “in virtual isolation,” Menasche said, forbidden from sending or receiving mail or having access to a phone. Family members aren’t informed of a detainee’s whereabouts, told only that they’ve been transferred. At API, detainees aren’t allowed to watch TV—Menasche said she was told that it’s because the TV can be used as a weapon—or read a newspaper. They’re unshackled only to use the bathroom or take a shower, and the only exercise they get is whatever the short distance the chain connecting their ankle to the bed will allow.

Nancy Kincaid, a spokesperson for the state’s Department of Mental Health, couldn’t comment on the conditions at API but said state laws governing the use of restraint dictate a procedure hospitals must follow.

“You can’t just restrain people or seclude people,” she said. “It has to be documented; the doctor has to actually see them. The doctor has to document why that person is in seclusion and restraint; they have to be checked every 15 minutes, and each hour the doctor has to see them again to re-evaluate.”

Patrick Ziemer, Alvarado Parkway’s CEO, didn’t respond to a phone call and e-mail from CityBeat by press time. Ziemer told a San Diego Union-Tribune reporter that state law allows him to limit a patient’s rights if he determines that there’s “good cause.” API is required to provide a quarterly report to San Diego County’s Department of Health and Human Services documenting why a hospitalized individual’s rights are denied and, according to state law, “denial of a person’s rights shall in all cases be entered into the person’s treatment record.”

Menasche said she’s requested, but hasn’t yet been given, access to patient files.

“API is not following state law—they may fill out the paperwork for denial of rights, but it is pro forma,” she said. “Good cause for denial of rights is to be based on an individual assessment, not on a blanket policy on a group of patients.”

Menasche sent a letter to county Mental Health Director Alfredo Aguirre on May 5 informing him of the conditions at API. On May 18, she received a message from Aguirre saying he was aware of the situation and would be following up with API and ICE. A county spokesperson told CityBeat that the county was unaware of detainee conditions prior to receiving Menasche’s letter.

“This has been going on under the radar for many years,” Menasche said.

Menasche said she was told that security concerns drive policy. In an April 24 letter to ICE’s California field directors, she summarized what she’d been told by Assistant Field Director John Garzon: “That the locked psychiatric facility at API was less secure than the Otay Detention facility, for example; that ICE was concerned about the possibility of escape from API (apparently, despite the presence of two armed guards per detainee); that a television could be used as a weapon; and that API had no provisions for monitoring mail or telephone calls, normally done at the Otay facility.”

Menasche said she was told these rules had become stricter since 9/11, though she noted in the April 24 letter that “Mr. Garzon was unable to point to any of the 700 detainees currently held at Otay that were being charged with terrorism or a terrorism-related crime.

“We are unaware of any relationship between national security concerns and the issues addressed herein,” she concluded.

In a written statement, ICE spokesperson Lauren Mack said Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano “has called for a comprehensive review of the nation’s immigration detention practices” and that “ICE is currently reviewing its visitation and telephone access practices for immigration detainees being housed in private psychiatric facilities to ensure they have appropriate access to both.”

Greg Pleasants, an attorney with Mental Health Advocacy Services in Los Angeles who brought the conditions at API to Menasche’s attention—two of his clients were held incommunicado for extended periods of time at various private psychiatric hospitals, API among them—emphasized that immigrant detainees should not be equated with prisoners being held for criminal violations.

“People who don’t understand immigration law think two things: that these people are somehow criminals and that they’re all undocumented—they’re all illegal, so to speak—they never had any status, they just entered the country illegally, but that’s not an accurate picture.

“Some of these people have never been convicted of crimes,” Pleasants said. “Second of all, they’re not in criminal custody—this is a civil matter entirely. Third of all, lots of these people, all of my clients or most, are long-term permanent residents who’ve been in the United State since they were children and have families here and work jobs here and pay taxes here and all the rest. They’re stuck in an immigration detention system that is bursting at the seams and is operating in a culture where the only important thing is deportation.”

Unlike criminal defendants, ICE detainees are not entitled to court-appointed legal representation. Nor are mentally ill detainees allowed a hearing before being committed involuntarily to a psychiatric hospital, Pleasants said.

“The Constitution requires—and this is binding on ICE just like it’s binding on everyone—that when a person in detention, when a prisoner or even a civil detainee… is involuntarily hospitalized, there has to be a procedure followed,” he said. “The person is entitled to a kind of hearing where they can say, ‘I don’t deserve to be hospitalized, I want to present evidence on my behalf, I want someone to help me.’ What we’re seeing in [ICE’s] conduct is this law is not being followed. They’re simply placing people in these facilities and basically involuntarily hospitalizing people without any kind of due process.

“They’ve created basically a little Guantanamo for people with severe mental-health issues,” Pleasants said. “And that doesn’t fly from a due-process standpoint.”

This story has been updated since its initial publication to include comments from ICE that came in after CityBeat’s deadline.

]]> http://bang.calit2.net/tts/2009/05/25/a-little-guantanamo-for-immigration-detainees-in-san-diego/feed/ http://bang.calit2.net/tts/2009/05/22/freephone-in-la-times-becoming-dragon-openings-next-week/ http://bang.calit2.net/tts/2009/05/22/freephone-in-la-times-becoming-dragon-openings-next-week/#comments Sat, 23 May 2009 04:07:00 +0000 lotu5 http://bang.calit2.net/tts/?p=359

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

WHAT: Freephone Art Project Provides Deported People with a Phone Call

WHO: Chris Head, Micha Cárdenas, Elle Mehrmand, Katherine Sweetman, Felipe
Zuñiga and Camilo Ontiveros

WHERE: Lui Velazquez Gallery, Calle José Maria Larroque #273, 2do Piso,
Int. 6, Colonia Federal, Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico, C.P. 22 300

WHEN: Saturday May 30th, 2009, 1-6pm

CONTACT: Micha Cárdenas, mcardenas a+ ucsd d()+ edu

The Freephone is an art project that aims to provide people just deported
from the US with a free phone call. To achieve this, a group of UCSD
Master of Fine Arts (MFA) students and graduates are coming together to
present the phone at the Lui Velazquez gallery in Tijuana, just a few feet
from the turnstiles where people who are deported are dropped off by the
border patrol. The project is by the artists Chris Head, Micha Cárdenas,
Elle Mehrmand, Katherine Sweetman, Felipe Zuñiga and Camilo Ontiveros

The Freephone is an effort to use new media performance art or performance
with technology to make the experience that people who are deported from
the US a little bit less difficult. To make the phone, the artists bought
a non working payphone casing from Ebay.com, wired it to a new $10 phone
from a store and hooked that up to an adapter which would allow the phone
to make calls over the internet. Then, the phone was installed outside of
the Lui Velazquez gallery. On Saturday, May 30th, the artists will do a public
performance including posting signs, talking to people coming through of
the turnstiles into Tijuana and sign spinning to direct people who may
have just been dropped off by the border patrol towards the free phone.
“Every day at this gallery we see people being deported by the Border
Patrol. We wanted to engage the public space outside of the gallery as
well as inside,” said Katherine Sweetman, director of Lui Velazquez.

“Art has the power to concretely improve people’s lives. Artists can go
beyond just representing or commenting on political issues and actually
engage in political action as art,” said Micha Cárdenas, recent graduate
from UCSD’s MFA program. “The Freephone is part of the tradition of Border
Disturbance Art along with projects such as the Transborder Immigrant Tool
from the Electronic Disturbance Theater”, said Cárdenas.

The Freephone will be shown on Saturday, May 30th as part of the Satellite
Ensemble II, a show by UCSD MFA students aimed at taking UCSD’s artistic
impact beyond the boundaries of the campus. The show will begin at
Agitprop gallery in North Park and will take place along the path from
that gallery to Lui Velazuez in Tijuana via public transit. In addition to
the Freephone, the show will include work by artists including Crystal
Z Campbell, Zac Monday, Clare Zitzow, Priscilla Lazaro, David White
and Anna Chiaretta Lavatellii.

“We want to not just make art with technology, but also show people how it
was made, how they can use it and how they can make their own open source
art projects,” said Chris Head, about the Freephone. To accomplish this,
the Freephone will be included in the ALTBIT open source art show later
this year at Lui Velazquez. ALTBIT is a project to combine a number of
open source and open hardware art projects together in one repository and
present them in workshops in various locations in the US and Mexico.

Initiated as part of the Society of Molecules, the Freephone performance
will be part of a distributed aesthetico-political event coordinated by
the Sense Lab at Concordia University in Montreal including artist groups
from around the world including Madrid, Naples, Boston, New York, Montreal
and other cities.

For more information on the Freephone, contact Micha Cárdenas
at mcardenas A+ ucsd d[]t edu

http://luivelazquez.com
http://alt-bit.org
http://visarts.ucsd.edu
http://ucsdse2.blogspot.com/
http://senselab.ca

#

First off, I can’t believe it, but I had my final committee meeting today, so I’m basically done with my MFA. Wow, I am so, so, so happy and relieved. Its still settling in. I’ve been in grad school for 4 years and now I have a “terminal degree”. Wild. I just have a few more edits to my catalog and video and then I’m done, but the committee already signed the forms! Hooray!!!

Secondly, I’m extremely happy to say that I’ve been invited to present at CTheory’s Critical Digital Studies Workshop at the Pacific Center for Technology and Culture in Victoria, Canada next month. I’ll be presenting a paper I’m currently working on entitled “Becoming Dragon: An Epistemology of Transition”. You can read more about the workshop, including a list of the other amazing presenters and their topics, here.

Come out and join us at Lui Velazquez in Tijuana on Wednesday. I’ll be talking about Becoming Dragon and performing some new poetry.

RESCHEDULED

Upgrade! Tijuana
Fifth session / Quita Sesion
Wednesday, May 13th, 7-9pm

charlas sobre/de… // talks by/about…

Transborder Immigrant Tool - Ricardo Dominguez and Brett Stalbaum
Becoming Dragon - Micha Cárdenas
Thighmaster - Annina Rust
Kixly - Moisés Horta

mas informacion sigue y en // more info below and at
http://upgrade.dreamaddictive.com

at Lui Velazquez

Lui Velazquez
Calle José Maria Larroque #273.
1ro Piso, Int. 6, Colonia Federal.
Tijuana, Baja California.
Mexico, C.P. 22 300**

directions and map at http://luivelazquez.com

Transborder Immigrant tool

The border between the U.S. and Mexico has moved between the virtual and
the all too real since before the birth of the two nation-states. This
has allowed a deep archive of suspect movement across this border to be
traced and tagged – specifically anchored to immigrants bodies moving
north, while immigrant bodies moving south much less so.

The danger of moving north across this border is not a question of
politics, but about the vertiginous geography. Hundreds of people have
died crossing the U.S./Mexico border due to not being able to tell where
they are in relation to where they have been and which direction they
need to go to reach their destination safely.

transborder

The technologies of Spatial Data Systems and GPS (Global Positioning
System) have enabled an entirely new relationship with the landscape
that takes form in applications for simulation, surveillance, resource
allocation, management of cooperative networks and pre-movement pattern
modeling an algorithm that maps out a potential or suggested trail for
real a hiker/or hikers to follow.

The Transborder Immigrant Tool would add a new layer of agency to this
emerging virtual geography that would allow segments of global society
that are usually outside of this emerging grid of
hyper-geo-mapping-power to gain quick and simple access with to GPS
system. The Transborder Immigrant Tool would not only offer access to
this emerging total map economy – but, would add an intelligent agent
algorithm that would parse out the best routes and trails on that day
and hour for immigrants to cross this vertiginous landscape as safely as
possible.

Ricardo Dominguez is a co-founder of The Electronic Disturbance Theater
(EDT), a group who developed Virtual-Sit-In technologies in 1998 in
solidarity with the Zapatista communities in Chiapas, Mexico. He is
co-Director of Thing (thing.net) an ISP for artists and activists. His
recent Electronic Disturbance Theater project with Brett Stabaum, Micha
Cardenas and Amy Sara Carroll the *Transborder Immigrant Tool* (a GPS
cellphone safety net tool for crossing the Mexico/U.S border was the
winner of “Transnational Communities Award”, this award was funded by
*Cultural Contact*, Endowment for Culture Mexico - U.S. and handed out
by the U.S. Embassy in Mexico), also funded by CALIT2 and two
Transborder Awards from the UCSD Center for the Humanities.

Ricardo is an Assistant Professor at UCSD in the Visual Arts Department,
a Hellman Fellow, and Principal/Principle Investigator at CALIT2
(bang.calit2.net). He also co-founder of *particle group* with artists
Diane Ludin, Nina Waisman, Amy Sara Carroll a gesture about
nanotechnology entitled *Particles of Interest: Tales of the Matter
Market* (pitmm.net) that was presented in Berlin (2007), the San Diego
Museum of Art (2008), and Oi Futuro, Brazil (2008).

http://bang.calit2.net/xborder/

Becoming Dragon

Becoming Dragon questions the one year requirement of Real Life
Experience that transgender people must fulfill in order to receive
Gender Confirmation Surgery (Sexual Reassignment Surgery), and asks if
this could be replaced by one year of Second Life Experience to lead to
Species Reassignment Surgery. For the performance, Micha Cárdenas lived
for 365 hours immersed in Second Life with a head mounted display, only
seeing the physical world through a video feed, and used a motion
capture system to map her movements into Second Life. The installation
also included a stereoscopic projection that the audience could immerse
themselves in. During the year of research and development of this
project, Micha Cárdenas began her real life hormone replacement therapy
and wrote poetry about the experience which was included in the
performance of Becoming Dragon.

Micha Cárdenas / dj lotu5 / Azdel Slade is a is a transgender artist,
theorist and trouble maker. She is an MFA candidate at the University of
California San Diego. and holds a Master’s degree in Media and
Communications with distinction from the European Graduate School and a
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Florida International
University. She is a researcher at CalIT2 and the Center for Research in
Computnig and the Arts. Her interests include the interplay of
technology, gender, sex, desire and resistance. Micha is a founding
member of a number of art/activism collectives including Sharing Is
Sexy, the borderlands Hacklab and the City Heights Free Skool. Her work
has been exhibited internationally at museums, galleries, conferences,
community spaces and public spaces.

http://secondloop.wordpress.com

Thighmaster

While technologists scramble to develop technologies for the production
and storage of environmentally friendly electricity, it is also
important to address our personal role in conserving energy. Indeed,
thermodynamics shows that we can’t get energy without spending it, and
while great efficiencies may be found in energy generation, it is clear
that the most substantial way to solve the energy crisis is by reducing
demand.

While reformulating lifestyle and habits is usually thought to be the
job of media, public relations, and activism, there is no reason that
technology should not be central to how we understand, consider, and
change our own energy usage. Most of us are unable to pay close
attention to our own power consumption in our busy daily lives. Indeed,
the purpose of consumer products is to make laborious tasks as simple
and easy as possible by replacing a consumer’s own energy with
electricity or fossil fuels. As a result, it’s easy for us to avoid
personal responsibility in the global climate crisis. This can produce
feelings of guilt and self-reproach in the consumer. Project Thigh
Master is a system that alleviates this condition by assuring that
reminders to save electricity will not go unnoticed, increasing its
owner’s peace of mind by setting a penalty for environmental waste.

http://web.media.mit.edu/~rusti/thighmaster/

Kixly

Started in 2005, Kixly is the solo project of TIjuana based artist
Moisés Horta Valenzuela.

Taking influence from the noisier side of shoegaze, the digital musique
concréte of Lucky Dragons and the classic studio techniques of
electronic music pioneers Steve Reich, William Basinski and Raymond
Scott, Kixly produced organic soundscapes as if created using analogue
recording techniques.

His sound has gradually shifted in order to express religious themes,
the relation between saint worship in mexican culture and pre-hispanic
panteism, and the psychological spirits of Moisés’ family ancestry.

In 2009 he co-founded, alongside Reuben Albert Torres, the
multidisciplinary label Ni, which includes regional artists Los Macuanos
and María y José.