fauxlographic by Elle Mehrmand :: November 21-23, 2011 :: Opening Reception and Performance: November 21; 6:00 pm :: University of California San Diego, Visual Arts Facility / Performance Space.

fauxlographic is a performative installation that takes place within an ethno-dysphoric cloning lab, where one can clone themselves in order to analyze their diasporic anxiety. The fauxlographic clones enact sonic rituals in Farsi, English and Perz-ish, based on multiple sources of information including embodied memories, wikileaks cables, and textual references concerning Iran and Persia. The ethno-dysphoric scientist performs a daily computing ritual wearing a neuro-headset, (pars)ing the (fars)e of the clones’ information. Continue reading

[Image: Bionet :: Recombinant by Eugene Thacker] Fever — an online multiplayer game about contemporary systems of medicine and health — by Spyros Nakas, Marountas John, Nektarios Nasser, Manos Loukopoulos.

Gameifying Medical Normativity by Daphne Dragona: What is the value of life today and how is it estimated? How does it relate to the dubious health and medical system of contemporary states and how do these elements affect the image of “life itself”?

Since the emergence of biopolitics back in the 18th century, when the body became the very center of interest and object of government, different standards and norms were established that could progressively control the entirety of human bios. With the help of demographics and statistics, life started being quantified and articulated and a multiplicity of men, a global mass became affected by overall processes characteristic of birth, death, production, illness and so on. Continue reading

Transformations Issue No. 20, 2011 — Slow Media: Digital Suicide and the Biopolitics of Leaving Facebook by Tero Karppi: Continue reading

net.walkingtools. Transformer.shift() by Micha Cárdenas, UC San Diego: The Transborder Immigrant Tool is a polyvalent, polygendered, collectively created project, a multiplicity. On one level, it is a J2ME java based application that allows users to access the GPS receiver function of a cheap cell phone without having service. On another level, it is an attempt to create an augmented geography, placing a transreal layer of information over the treacherous desert terrain of the US/ Mexico border. Our collective imagines the phone as a biopolitical gesture, an experiment in Science of the Oppressed, a form of poetic sustenance and a media virus. In this lecture/ performance I will discuss how the TBT conjures spirits of mayan and queer technologies, as well as fears and realities of technology’s ability to disturb borders: national, gender, genre, disciplinary, fiction/non.

Living Mediations: Biology, Technology and Art — A forum hosted by HASTAC Scholars. Register to join the conversation.

Summary: Much contemporary scholarship is interested in how the biological body, on any scale, becomes a site for political, technological, scientific, and critical engagement. The founding of the Human Genome Project in 1988 marked the life sciences as a major cultural paradigm of the late twentieth century; the first decade of the twenty-first century has continued this proliferation of the biological, initiating the increased funding and visibility of such phenomena as biomedia, biotechnology, bioinformatics, biometrics, and other technological engagements with the biological. Mediation is important to this proliferation, and media studies has taken up the biological in its many forms. Continue reading

Never written stories :: Symposium: June 20-23, 2011 :: CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Av. Constitución 23, 28931 Móstoles, Madrid, Spain :: Open Call for research projects on artistic theory and practice — Deadline for Applications: May 16.

Beyond the economic problem, the negativity of the current crisis is basically linked to the deactivation of the capacity of inventing a future. However, we must remind that every crisis opens up spaces of possibility. To assume that, as immaterial producers, we all participate in the creation of collective imagination entails the risk that neoliberal directives use as a tool the triad constituted by “innovation-creativity-invention.” In this inevitably shared space, critical artistic practices keep on defending the power of imagination as a political faculty that unite memory and prediction. Continue reading

Where Do You Stand, Colleague? Art Criticism and Social Critique — Symposium on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of Texte zur Kunst :: December 11, 2010 :: Hebbel-Theater am Ufer (HAU 1), Stresemannstrasse 29, Berlin.

On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the renowned Berlin-based journal for contemporary art, this symposium investigates art criticism’s potential to become social critique. When the journal was founded in Cologne in 1990, returning to the methods of social art history promised to link current artistic production to larger economic and ideological frameworks. Continue reading

Upgrade! Boston: Caitlin Berrigan :: December 7, 2010; 7:00 – 9:00 pm :: MIT Media Lab (E14), 6th Floor, Room 633, 75 Amherst Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts (map).

Caitlin Berrigan is an artist who works at the intersection of performance, edible sculpture, participatory actions and the life sciences to initiate dialogue about biopolitics and culture. Tactics of delicate provocation spark dissonance in the audience’s visceral and cognitive experience of her work, favoring multivalent readings and responses. In producing anxiety and revealing layers of ambiguous emotions, her artwork opens a space of potential to confront uncertainty within the context of social issues. Continue reading

Media-N, v.05 n.03, Winter 2009: agriART: Companion Planting for Social and Biological Systems; Mark Cooley and Ryan Griffis, guest editors.

[…] agriArt is an attempt to highlight other possibilities for the consideration and development of bio art. As an exhibition, it brought together an array of art works that critically engage with cultures of food production and consumption as a specific site of biopolitics. In essence, our concern was to step back from the assumption that bio art needs to start at the line drawn by industrial capitalism, and look at the work of artists investigating other intersections of the biological and social. The questions they pose are not exercises in philosophico-ethical deliberations that take for granted a given industrial paradigm as the most productive site of action. Instead, they practice a relation between the biological and the social that is pragmatically opposed to the instrumentalization of life that Critical Art Ensemble has termed the molecular invasion. Continue reading

Centre for Contemporary and Digital Performance Research Seminar Series :: School of Arts, GB048, Gaskell Building Brunel University, Cleveland Road, Uxbridge Middlesex UB8 3PH UK.

Research Seminar 1: October 7; 5:00 pm: Louie Jenkins — Immortal Stages: Liminality, death and performance.

Louie Jenkins is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Chichester in the Performing Arts Department and the coordinator of the new Drama degree. Her specialisms are in Performance Writing, Solo Performance, Devising and Applied and Interventionist Theatre. She has completed the first year of a practice-based PhD at Brunel University, where her research focus is on biopolitics, death and performance. Continue reading