[-empyre-] [Science of the oppressed and garageScience]

[dj lotu5]

hi christina,

i finally have a minute to respond to this, thanks for asking about the 
transborder tool!

just a few notes i was thinking about tonight at the dog park...

we have a working version of the software, and we've been testing it on 
campus and in the desert, but we're working on a more detailed map, 
issues of deployment such as translation, component and use case testing 
and will be working on this more in the summer/fall.

the project has different trajectories and resonances that we all bring 
to the collaboration. its definitely part of our histories of border 
disturbance art and artivism, and the mapping of humanitarian safety 
points is only possible by working with local organizations in san diego 
and tijuana.

brett (who i'm not sure if he's on this list) situates the tool in the 
tradition of walking art, including debord and the situationists, but in 
a drive to move locative media out of urban settings an into wild 
settings like the desert.

ricardo also speaks of the tool as part of a sort of third wave new 
media, if we can think of early pre-network pieces, and then pieces that 
emerge out of a net condition and is concerned more with the purely 
virtual, and then more recent work involving locative media, motion 
capture and computer vision as demonstrating a move to integrate digital 
media back into the world. perhaps the upcoming Digital Arts and Culture 
conference's theme "after media" sums this up well.

personally, the work of augusto boal is very important to my practice, 
in the way that he focuses on thinking through the body and social 
issues, just as is gloria anzaldua's and chela sandoval's "consciencia 
de la mestiza", being mixed race and queer myself.

one of the main goals for the project is to be a humanitarian aid, so in 
that way it is less duchampian and more in the mode of art with a social 
use. yet there is also a poetic module, which offers the user poetic 
welcoming messages as they travel, providing a kind of "poetic 
sustenance", bringing the modality of hospitality into a treacherous 
desert traversal.

it is another piece that deals with scalability in a way, as the large 
database of gps waypoints we have accumulated is critical, and the focus 
of the project is to make that database usable to communities that need 
it, and there is literally an act of scaling involved in taking the 
geography of the borderlands and converting it into a tiny handheld 
navigational device.

thanks,

  micha



naxsmash wrote:
> dear Ricardo and Micha,
>
> I really love your linking of Augusto Boal  to this idea of a  
> subversive nano garage scale of production-- pervasive under the radar  
> wet assembly~!
> and your nearfuture scenarios (2011,2019, etc)
>
> is it possible to talk a bit here about your fall 2009 launch  
> ( presumably real world?~)
>
> I am referring to  your comment below " Electronic Disturbance  
> Theater’s Transborder Immigrant Tool, a
> work-in-progress (in collaboration with Brett Stalbaum, Micha Cardenas  
> and
> Amy Sara Carroll), is ready to move from alpha stage software design to
> beta testing in the Fall 2009"
>
>
> Your very long first post is much appreciated and I am just picking up  
> on the last bit here.
>
>
> -christina
>
> Ricardo writes:
>
> "[Science of the oppressed and garageScience]
>
> "We can imagine Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, Chela  
> Sandoval’s
> Methodology of the Oppressed, Critical Art Ensemble’s tactical science,
> Natalie Jeremijenko public experiments and what the Electronic  
> Disturbance
> Theater has framed today as the “science of the oppressed” – each of  
> these
> parts of a wide area call for a re-framed relationalilty between
> spectator, poesis, praxis, experimentation and Sandoval’s differential
> consciousness of the “la conciencia de la metiza”.  Each gesture  
> diagrams
> alternative social forms of life and art that fall between the known and
> unknown, between fiction and the real, between clean science and dirty
> science – each a part of a long history of an epistemology of social
> production which privileges the standpoint of the proletariat, the
> multitude, the open hacks of the DIY moments, and of autonomous
> investigators who stage test zones of cognitive styles-as/and out of –
> concrete practices as speculation and speculation as concrete  
> practices –
> at the speed of dreams.
>
> "What the artivist adds to this circuit is the ability to stage  
> potential
> rehearsals for the now-and-future community laboratories, for the
> nanoGarages to come, for the current empirical speculations of new
> ecologies of social formations that can create a space for the agency of
> actor-spectators – that can route around the neoliberal walls of  
> “venture
> science” as only protocol for “scientific” research and instead offer a
> counter-frame/unframe of a science for and by the people. As Boal  
> stated,
> “we must move towards a rehearsal-theater and away from a
> spectacle-theater.” The “science of the oppressed” for EDT is type of
> “rehearsal-lab” that imagines community laboratories blooming from the
> always/already “lowrider” robotics of East L.A., from the Zapatista  
> “Open
> Seed” an assemblage Open Wetware lab(s) – each garage a “rehearsal-lab”
> for new agency(s) defined by the people/the citizen/the nomad to “resume
> their protgonistic function” between/within/without art and science.
>
> P.S.EDT is type of “rehearsal-lab”
>
> P.P.S
> Electronic Disturbance Theater’s Transborder Immigrant Tool, a
> work-in-progress (in collaboration with Brett Stalbaum, Micha Cardenas  
> and
> Amy Sara Carroll), is ready to move from alpha stage software design to
> beta testing in the Fall 2009."
>
>
>
>
> ------------
> naxsmash
> naxsmash at mac.com
>
>
> christina mcphee
>
> http://christinamcphee.net
> http://naxsmash.net
>
>
>
>
>
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>