[-empyre-] Welcome to week 2 on empye Social Media/Social Justice.

[Renate Ferro]

Hi empyreans,
While we set the rather practical tone for our December discussion
Social Media/Social Justice last week, we will expand with three new
guests: Ricardo Dominguez, Richard Grusin, and Rahul Mukherjee.
Welcome to all three. Looking forward to it.  Renate

Week 2:
Ricardo Dominguez is a co-founder of The Electronic Disturbance Theater
(EDT), a group who developed virtual sit-in technologies in solidarity
with the Zapatistas communities in Chiapas, Mexico, in 1998. His recent
Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab project
(http://bang.transreal.org/) with Brett Stalbaum, Micha Cardenas, Amy
Sara Carroll, and Elle Mehrmand, the Transborder Immigrant Tool (a GPS
cell phone safety net tool for crossing the Mexico/US border) was the
winner of “Transnational Communities Award” (2008), an award funded by
Cultural Contact, Endowment for Culture Mexico–US and handed out by
the US Embassy in Mexico. It also was funded by CALIT2 and the UCSD
Center for the Humanities. The Transborder Immigrant Tool has been
exhibited at the 2010 California Biennial (OCMA), Toronto Free
Gallery, Canada (2011), The Van Abbemuseum, Netherlands (2013), ZKM,
Germany (2013), as well as a number of other national and
international venues. The project was also under investigation by the
US Congress in 2009-2010 and was reviewed by Glenn Beck in 2010 as a
gesture that potentially “dissolved” the U.S. border with its poetry.
Dominguez is an associate professor at the University of California,
San Diego, in the Visual Arts Department, a Hellman Fellow, and
Principal/Principle Investigator at CALIT2 and the Performative
Nano-Robotics Lab at SME, UCSD. He also is co-founder of *particle
group*, with artists Diane Ludin, Nina Waisman, Amy Sara Carroll,
whose art project about nano-toxicology entitled *Particles of
Interest: Tales of the Matter Market* has been presented at the House
of World Cultures, Berlin (2007), the San Diego Museum of Art (2008),
Oi Futuro, Brazil (2008), CAL NanoSystems Institute, UCLA (2009),
Medialab-Prado, Madrid (2009), E-Poetry Festival, Barcelona, Spain
(2009), Nanosférica, NYU (2010), and SOMA, Mexico City, Mexico (2012,
and the Cornell Biennial, “Intimate Cosmologies: The Aesthetics of
Scale in an Age of Nanotechnology,” (2014).  *particle group*

Richard Grusin (US) is Director of the Center for 21st Century Studies
and Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, a
position he assumed in July 2010.  He received his Ph.D. in 1983 from
the University of California-Berkeley.  He has published numerous
chapters and articles and written four books.  The first,
Transcendentalist Hermeneutics: Institutional Authority and the Higher
Criticism of the Bible (Duke, 1991), concerns the influence of
European (primarily German) theories of biblical interpretation on the
New England Transcendentalists.  His more recent work concerns
historical, cultural, and aesthetic aspects of technologies of visual
representation.  With Jay David Bolter he is the author of
Remediation: Understanding New Media (MIT, 1999), which sketches out a
genealogy of new media, beginning with the contradictory visual logics
underlying contemporary digital media; Remediation has become required
reading for undergraduates and graduate students in the field of new
media studies. Culture, Technology, and the Creation of America’s
National Parks (Cambridge, 2004), focuses on the problematics of
visual representation involved in the founding of America's national
parks.  His fourth book, Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11
(Palgrave, 2010), argues that in an era of heightened securitization,
socially networked US and global media work to pre-mediate collective
affects of anticipation and connectivity, while also perpetuating low
levels of apprehension or fear. As Director of the Center for 21st
Century Studies he has organized three successful international
conferences: The Nonhuman Turn in 21st Century Studies; Dark Side of
the Digital; and Anthropocene Feminism.  He is currently editing books
based upon the plenary addresses for these conferences.

Rahul Mukherjee (IN, US)

Rahul Mukherjee is Assistant Professor of Television and New Media
Studies in the Cinema Studies Program, Department of English at
University of Pennsylvania. He is working towards conceptualizing the
materiality of mediated technoscience publics based on case studies of
environmental debates related to cell towers and nuclear energy.

https://cinemastudies.sas.upenn.edu/people/RahulMukherjee