[-empyre-] Not sure this allo-viral made it into the germ pool? yesterday

[Ricardo Dominguez]

Hola all and Brooke,

I really enjoyed "undesigning" poster Brooke and it would be really great
to slip into classrooms from pre-k to post-grad spaces. (I will work on
that.)

I do think that the tactical re-engineering is an important gesture and
one that has been important in my thinking since I first encountered
the community research initiatives that ACT UP/SF - Golden Gate established
in late 80's as a response to the viral politics of therapeutic state at
the time.

And by creating a "hactivating design" gesture of smashing popular
toothpaste with the politics of the question that can become viral - which
at the core of its performative matrix is that anyone can do it. Now that
I have a young son everything becomes amplified in terms of toxicities at
all levels. We are encountering particle capitalism(s) clouds at every
scale of being. Which, is an important theme for the *particle group* as
well (http://pitmm.net).

As, part of video mediation on Open Fabrication systems, the attempted to
bring together EDT/*particle group* and the other gestures that
criss-crossed each other under the sign of “science of the oppressed”
(which I came to understand came from Monique Wittig – really fantastico)
- here is a section of the text that I thought might fall into the sphere
of “hactivating design”:

[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  “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.

The whole video is here:

http://medialab-prado.es/article/nanogarajes_especulaciones_sobre_fabbing_abierto

Also, some other thoughts on these themes by *particle group*'s
Nanosférica presentation:
http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/particle-group-intro
-- 
Ricardo Dominguez
Associate Professor
Hellman Fellow

Visual Arts Department, UCSD
http://visarts.ucsd.edu/
Principal Investigator, CALIT2
http://calit2.net
Co-Chair gallery at calit2
http://gallery.calit2.net
CRCA Researcher
http://crca.ucsd.edu/
Ethnic Studies Affiliate
http://www.ethnicstudies.ucsd.edu/
Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies Affiliate
http://cilas.ucsd.edu


Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics,
Board Member
http://hemi.nyu.edu

University of California, San Diego,
9500 Gilman Drive Drive,
La Jolla, CA 92093-0436
Phone: (619) 322-7571
e-mail: rrdominguez at ucsd.edu

Project sites:
site: http://gallery.calit2.net
site: http://pitmm.net
site: http://bang.calit2.net
site: http://www.thing.net/~rdom
blog:http://post.thing.net/blog/rdom