The 18th Annual David Noble lecture featuring Professor Ricardo Dominguez will be held Tuesday, April 17th at 5pm in the Influx Room, Regis Center for Art. Prof. Dominguez will present the lecture "Contestational Design: Tactical Poetics and Strategic Aesthetics".
Click here for an event flier.
TALK: For Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab the border is a shape shifting and performing system that can manifest other potential spaces of use and poetics beyond what it intends or imagines as "security" or "immuniz(N)ation." We have sought to create different types of contestational art that allows us to develop an aesthetics of border disturbances that constitute a visible geo-ethics against the boundaries and the borderless borders that are crisscrossing every single body on the planet: we call for an geo-aesthetics that starts at the nanoscale and flows up to the GPS (Global Position System) grid system that floats around the planet; we call for a aesthetics that connects both the human and the inhuman; we call for an geo-aesthetics that crosses into and dislocates the smooth space of geo-spatial mobility with ethical objects for multiple forms of sustenance. Our work attempts to construct an aesthetic imaginary attuned to the performative complexities for the new earths to come, that can touch new geographies for new bodies - transbodies with transborder rights. The key practices that both fractalize and invent this geo-aesthetics are: artivism, tactical poetries, hacktivism(s), new media theater, border disturbance art/technologies, augmented realities, speculative cartographies, queer technologies, transnational feminisms and code, digital Zapatistismo, dislocative gps, and intergalactic performances. The presentation will seek to establish the potential methods for designing contestation as dislocation, reconfiguration and reparation of globalization-as-borders.
BIO: 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. His recent Electronic Disturbance Theater project with Brett Stabaum, Micha Cardenas, Dr. Amy Sara Carroll (University of Michigan), and Elle Mehrman, the *Transborder Immigrant Tool* (a GPS cellphone safety net tool for crossing the Mexico/U.S border was the winner of "Transnational Communities Award" (2008), 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. *Transborder Immigrant Tool* was exhibited at 2010 California Biennial(OCMA), Toronto Free Gallery, Canada (2010), the project was also under investigation by the U.S. Congress in 2009/10, and was also reviewed by Glenn Beck in 2010 as a gesture that potentially "dissolved" the U.S. border with its poetry. Ricardo is an Associate Professor at UCSD in the Visual Arts Department, a Hellman Fellow, and Principal/Principle Investigator at CALIT2 (http://bang.calit2.net). He also co-founder of *particle group*, with artists Diane Ludin, Nina Waisman, Amy Sara Carroll, an art project about nano-toxicology entitled *Particles of Interest: Tales of the Matter Market* that has been presented in Berlin (2007), the San Diego Museum of Art (2008), Oi Futuro, and FILE festivals in Brazil (2008), CAL NanoSystems Institute, UCLA (2009), Medialab-Prado, Madrid (2009), and Nanosferica, NYU (2010).
