Schedule
EMF and the Everyday
We are surrounded by electromagnetic wave fields. All of our electronic devices create and emit them- from our cell phones and watches to the security gates we pass through on a daily basis. In this hands on workshop, we will discuss what they are, and how artists use them to listen to the world around us and create works that explore the unseen everyday. We will get a chance to listen to our own equipment as well as the room and surrounding city through a guided walk/tour.
National Bird
In my most recent performance workshop series, entitled “The National Bird,” I examine different migratory animals, establishing the premise that wild creatures can legally cross territorial boundaries without checkpoints, anytime and anywhere. The performance entails a series of exercises invoking the natural behaviors of these creatures, using our bodies as the primary medium. These performative exercises attempt to illuminate the privilege nonhumans have in terms of the choice of travel, location for settlement, and the ease of traversing borders, both the physical and the imaginary.
Thinking Like a Mushroom
Cesar & Lois talks and walks viewers through what it means to think across borders that delineate systems of knowledge. We will consider a manifesto written by microbiological entities and partake in a meditation on thinking across different types of borders – as mycelia. Within the workshop we will approach “Thinking like a Mushroom” as a collective, by walking and talking through non-neural modes of thinking that exist in and across nature. What happens when human knowledge passes through a network of interconnected conduits, capable of ecosystemic synapses and the communications that flow from these? Artifacts of mushrooms fruiting on books are introduced for contemplating crossing the borders of knowledge – integrating fungal and human knowledge systems. The workshop challenges participants to consciously adopt fungal properties of being and thinking. With the imagery of mushrooms growing on books and a guided meditation that contemplates thinking like a mushroom, we will collectively consider microbiological logic as a source and system for understanding. Cesar & Lois asks what borders can we cross in our collaborative thinking, and, importantly: What happens if we insert fungal systems into human knowledge systems?
Threads (Audio Walk)
Moving through space and time. Stories arise, unfold, fall away - interwoven threads of the present. Listening, looking, walking.
Moderator
How do interfaces -- these border zones between our bodies and technological objects -- function? How do they serve as sites of biopolitical control? How do these interfaces serve to reify unabashed and unquestioned belief in the power of the technological apparatus? Interfaces determine the border between machine and non-machine, between programmed object and agent user. Like borders of nation-states, the borders of interfaces also exert a kind of political control over its subjects -- namely us, the users. Interfaces, in the parlance of Jacques Rancière, participate in the “distribution of the sensible,” meaning that they help construct that which can be apprehended by the senses. It is at the interface that the dominant regime of truth is both established and reified, shaping what can be sensed, perceived, and therefore that which can be contested. The interface-border can be seen as a kind of tunnel, created in the service of maintaining a particular ideological hegemony. This panel convenes artists, designers, and new media scholars whose work interrogates the interface as a border and as an apparatus of control.
