technesexual excerpt // Duke University // Micha Cárdenas and Elle Mehrmand from azdel slade on Vimeo.

//The sound is very low frequency, so please use headphones or good speakers to hear the video//

Performed in Durham, North Carolina at Duke University’s SoundSense Studio.

In technésexual the performers commit playful erotic acts in physical and virtual space simultaneously, using devices to amplify the sound of their heartbeats for the two audiences. An electrocardiogram was used to monitor the heart rate with an Arduino/Freeduino, playing a recording of the heartbeat at the correct rate using Puredata. Temperature sensors modulate the audio based on touch. DIY biometrics are used to bridge realities with audio, finding ways of exploring the space between realities.

technésexual opens discussion on the multitude of sexualities outside of the restrictive LGBT formulation and homo/hetero categories, which are rooted in binary gender assumptions. The mixing of realities in this project can be seen as paralleling our own experiences mixing genders and sexualities, queering new media. Virtual worlds such as Second Life facilitate the development of new identities, allowing for unimagined relations and relationships. technésexual looks closely at these new relationships, how they affect our everyday lives and horizons of possibility.

More information at http://transreal.org, http://bang.calit2.net/elle and http://bang.calit2.net/wiki/Mixed_Relations

Join us!
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Seventh%20Eye/156/42/236

http://bang.calit2.net/elle

More info here…

GUTTED: LACE’s Annual Winter Benefit

20 February 2010 8pm
with guest curator Dino Dinco

Doors open 7pm

LACE is pleased to present GUTTED: LACE’S ANNUAL WINTER BENEFIT. This year, LACE has teamed up with Los Angeles-based curator Dino Dinco, who brings his own passions and experience to this annual fundraising event. Inspired by Los Angeles’ history of performance art and LACE’s role as an open platform for artistic expression, Dinco has reached out to a range of artists, both established and emerging, to present an unrestrained evening of contemporary performance.

GUTTED showcases a daring ensemble of live performance, texts and objects speaking of, from and to the body. With a roster of creative talent spanning thirty years of live performance, GUTTED illustrates an array of ways artists have addressed the human form, spanning issues of domesticity and labor, AIDS, race, social activism, queerness, straightness, bodybuilding, body destruction, fantasy & grotesquerie.

Participating artists include: Benjamin Weissman, Raquel Gutierrez, Xuanito Carlos Espinoza Cuellar, Sheree Rose, Monica Duncan, Alice Cunt, Lucas Michael, Elle Mehrmand and Micha Cardenas, Marcus Civin, Ryan Heffington, Rafael Esparza and Gronk, Brian Getnick/THE BALLET, Hi Fashion $9.99, Julie Tolentino and Pigpen, Taisha Ciara Paggett, Heather Cassils, Mariel Carranza, Dorian Wood, Samuel Vasquez, Bela Messex, Juan Martin del Campo Jr., and Joseph Shahadi.

The impetus for GUTTED stems from my love for performance as well as my ongoing interest in the work of French philosopher and social critic Jean-Luc Nancy, particularly his work Corpus.  In this work, Nancy articulates that there is no ontology of the body, but rather, the body is ontology itself.  The body is a familiar subject of discourse in the arts, as we have and will always already work from the body.  A body of work.  A body of knowledge. Through Nancy, I view LACE – the space – as a body that will fill with bodies, where the ongoing conversation about our / their / your bodies will continue. –Dino Dinco

All proceeds benefit LACE programs.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS…

Next week, Elle and I are heading out to Durham, North Carolina to do a performance and artist talk at Duke University. We’re extremely happy to meet the faculty at Duke including Katherine Hayles, Michael Hardt and Elizabeth Grosz (who’s visiting this quarter!). We’ll also be meeting with their Experiencing Virtual Worlds interdisciplinary research group to discuss some of our recent writing. So if you’re in Durham or know someone who might be interested, let them know!

technésexual
a mixed reality performance
1/25 @ 6pm, SoundSense Studio, CIEMAS

Erotic Mixed Reality Performance
an artist talk
1/27 @ 4pm, Nasher Museum Auditorium

Sponsored by:
The Experiencing Virtual Worlds Working Group
Information Science + Information Studies
Art, Art History and Visual Studies
Women’s Studies

Occupy the University: Reconsidering the Local

Micha Cárdenas

In a conversation recorded for pros* journal, Teddy Cruz and Rick Lowe agree that socially engaged art has the ability to actually change the material conditions under which art is made and in which people’s lives occur. They seem to agree that the best way to change housing conditions is to engage at the level of local legislation, housing associations and city governments. I would like to intervene on this point. While I agree that socially engaged art can change people’s lives, my intervention, to be simple, is to say that the decision about how to intervene is not so simple. Cruz and Lowe urge artists to engage in local city politics, yet I argue that perhaps an even more local focus may be more beneficial. In her book When Species Meet, Donna Haraway describes a feminist approach to political ethics, which accepts our finitude, contingency and historical situatedness. Her approach acknowledges that from a position of a lack of certainty, “there is no outside from which to answer that mandatory question”[2] of what political action to take. Refusing to take a political action is still a political action, and so we are faced with “bearing the mortal consequences” of our choices of where to put our artistic energies in this expanded field where any artistic practice is apparently acceptable. My own affinity with a feminist ethics of uncertainty grew out of my work with Avital Ronell at the European Graduate School where I asked, “But how can we sit and discuss the deep meaning of this punctuation mark while bombs are being dropped on people?” Her response was, to paraphrase, that by introducing doubt into commonly accepted definitions of ideas and political strategies, that the decisions about dropping those bombs, or imprisoning people, may be stalled, changed or ended.

By considering the university institution in which this discussion takes place, with its framework of research and knowledge production, we can find ourselves implicated and complicit on a new level. While the rhetoric of humanist charities or of helping the poor children of the world may sound convincing as a call to involve artists in questions of social engagement, it also serves the institution to appear engaged in the communities. In fact, one could argue that reproducing this dialogue serves to entrench the existing conditions instead of changing them. I propose that a wide section of contemporary artists are concerned with shifting, altering, rethinking and recreating the material conditions of society and choosing very different approaches from Cruz and Lowe, a few of which I will outline here. These artists and activists question the structures that create and enable political and economic conditions, and structures of knowledge production, such as scientific dogma and medical definitions. The Electronic Disturbance Theater’s notion of Science of the Oppressed will serve as a useful guide for understanding practices which seek to re-imagine knowledge production in the service of social movements and oppressed peoples. The practices presented here seek to intervene in society at the level of the causes of social inequity, of the underlying knowledge structures, instead of working through local legislation, which could be seen as merely a symptom….

Read the rest at pros.ucsd.edu

Repost from http://ohselavy.blogspot.com/2010/01/wedding.html

The performance of 01.10.10 a wedding

SLURL

UPON ARRIVAL PLEASE TAKE THE TELEPORT TO THE CATHEDRAL

You are invited to the SL wedding performance of Selavy Oh and Misprint Thursday on Sunday January 10th at 1pm slt. THIS IS A FAKE WEDDING. IT IS PERFORMANCE ART. The performance is a reflection and celebration of “creative community” and how we intersect and play off each other’s work, ideas and environments. The objects, costumes, props and personas in this performance are reflective of the playful and creative domain of SL art.

Why a wedding? The performance of a wedding grew out of a poetically whimsical “faux proposal” from Misprint Thursday to Selavy Oh. The proposal was accepted and the faux partnership was formed. From there, the fantastic thread has unraveled leading us to this culminating encounter. We are all “wed” in our experiences and connective creativity in this environment in many ways aren’t we?

To view the performance:
Set to Midnight
Have your sounds and video enabled
Grab the Info In the Cathedral Foyer when you arrive

In keeping with the performance please feel free to participate by dressing any combination of “ecclectic formal”.

Much thanks and appreciation to Corrine Cerise for the generous land use to host this event and Marko Seurat for providing the wonderful builds on said land.

Tremendous YAY for all the artists and actors to participate in this fast paced, fun and surreal community art event. CHEERS!

ARTISTS:

Misprint Thursday and Selavy Oh
collaborators and co-conspirators in performance

Marko Seurat-Set Design (cathedral and sky build)
Bryn Oh-Catherdal Art curated and placed by Marko Seurat
Suzanne Graves-Cathedral Art curated and placed by Marko Seurat
ColeMarie Soleil-Machinima Documentation
myvegancookbook Bolissima-Costume for brides
Dekka Raymaker-Wedding Documents
Solo Mornington-Rings
L1Aura Loire-Nuptial Couch
Rod Mandel-Interactive Wedding seating
Ze Moo-Minister 1
Xenophile Neurocam-Minister 2
Penumbra Carter-Minister 3 and cake creator
Joonie Jatho-Deflowered Girl
Arrow Inglewood-Best Man and Ice Sculpture creator
Captain Pike-Usher
Positive Hinterland-Bridesmaid
Negative Overland-Bridesmaid
Dekka Raymaker-Wedding Documents
curmudgeon Krasner-Witness
Peri Afarensis-Witness
Azdel Slade and echolalia Azalee – Mixed Reality Performance
Oberon Onmura-Reception Art
Jo Ellsmere-Reception Chairs
Maya Paris-Table Centerpieces

notecard text by misprint thursday

Demand nothing, Occupy everything: a Primer on Neoliberalism and its
Discontents

“Demand Nothing, Occupy Everything” is a film series examining
neoliberalism, one of the roots of the current economic crisis affecting
universities around the world, and the strategies that social movements
have been using to respond to and push back against neoliberalism. The
series considers the possibilities for political action today, as well as
its limitations. The films in the series range from documentation of
political actions to examinations of political theory and fictional
accounts of important moments of political unrest. The topics range from a
historical view of student actions in the 60’s to an international view
considering actions around the world and a selection of recent videos
spread virally through social networks online.

Each film night will begin with a short talk by Micha Cárdenas or a guest
speaker to situate the film in the context of the current social situation
across the University of California, but also at universities around the
world. Specific focus will be given to personal experiences with these
movements, the effects of neoliberalism on education and to efforts to
reimagine what education could be.

All screenings will take place at the Visual Arts Facility (VAF) Performance Space from 7-9pm.

Tuesday, Jan 12 -

And the War Has Only Just Begun by Tiqqun
Excerpts from La Haine by Kassovitz
Excerpts from If… by Lindsay Anderson
Los Angeles UCLA Student Protest
Student Occupation of New School
UCSC Occupation – Friday Night
ASTRONAUTS SEE UC STRIKE FROM SPACE

Tuesday, Jan 19 -

Excerpts from Un Granito de Arena
The Potentiality of Storming Heaven – on the Greek Student Occupations
Excerpts from Tout Va Bien by JP Gorin and Jean-Luc Godard
UC Berkeley Protests at Wheeler Hall Part 2
UC Berkeley Budget Protest. The Wheeler Frontlines
Occupied Berkeley: The Taking of Wheeler Hall

Tuesday, Feb 2 -

Semiotics of the Kitchen by Martha Rosler
Excerpts from the Fourth World War
Excerpts from The Take
Okupa! by Micha Cárdenas
Can Dialectics Break Bricks? by René Viénet
UCSC Occupation #4 – Kerr Hall – Fri

“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… 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?
…This is why we make no demands. Because we want to be in solidarity with all who are oppressed and exploited. We will not say who they are in advance. They will define themselves by rising up and standing with us.”

- Anti-Capital Projects: Questions and Answers
http://anticapitalprojects.wordpress.com/2009/11/19/anti-capital-projects/

Organized by Micha Cárdenas, Ricardo Dominguez and Elle Mehrmand of the b.a.n.g. lab.

Performative Interventions: The Progression of 4D Art in a Virtual 3D World

“Time” is always present in our interaction with works of art, whether we sit to contemplate a painting, stroll past a sculpture, or watch a video piece for its entire duration or cycle. Some works of art are time-based in that the viewer must experience them through the passage of time, as with music, while others refer to time through links or references to art history, our collective human history, or the timelessness of nature.
—Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century, Season 2, Episode: Time

Art in the twenty-first century, reflecting and defining new developments in a variety of areas, has radically extended the conventional media of time-based, or 4D work. Following Virtual Artists’ Immersive Discoveries in a Virtual 3D Frontier, I interviewed several Second Life artists who evoke time in their work…

Artists Azdel Slade (Micha Cardenas) and echolalia Azalee (Elle Mehrmand) set up a live video feed for my Mixed Reality interview with them. Mixed reality (MR) refers to the merging of real and virtual worlds to produce new environments where physical and digital objects co-exist and interact in real time. Mixed Reality events in SL are streamed real-time into a region. Streaming media is projected in the live event and may include feedback via text or audio from the Second Life audience…

Read more at Art21

Becoming Dragon: an Epistemology of Transition (PDF 5.8MB)