UNMANNED INTERVENTIONS with Ricardo Dominguez

This artist talk with artists Ricardo Dominguez, Sean Estelle, Ian Alan Paul, Alex Rivera and Trish Stone is part of the Drones at Home Phase 3 exhibition which runs Oct. 18 to Nov. 14. The exhibition will also include works by Gregory Sholette.

Artist and filmmaker Alex Rivera will be developing a project that explores and reconfigures a UAV aerial platform that will seek to engage with the drone industry in San Diego by employing visual texts from areas where drones are heavily deployed. The Calit2 b.a.n.g. lab (bang.calit2.net) will present designs for a singing border drone entitled, The Palindrone.

Trish Stone will exhibit videos from her project titled Lighter Than Air, an artist-led activity featuring the launch of a balloon drone (a weather balloon fitted with a video camera). The activity is open to community participation on many levels, including flying the balloon, holding neighboring balloons, and using hand-held mirrors to communicate with the aerial surveillance device.

Artist Gregory Sholette is featured in the UNMANNED INTERVENTIONS exhibit but will not be present for the artist talk on Oct. 23. The iDrone is a sort of lumpy, predator drone-like sculpture whose chassis is made of faded documents, images and other archival materials from both the little-known radical past of America and artist Gregory Sholette. Some of these come from his own activist art past, and other documents are things he has researched. Viewers can zoom in on the various archival images and publications, and clicking on certain documents takes viewers to various websites, while clicking on other documents provides a PDF of what is represented. It is all bound together so that the entire contraption hovers so that iDrone becomes our repressed history returning in the form of a weaponized thing. http://www.3das.gr/space/greg.html

Surveilled by Sean Estelle is the final product of his work in the Calit2 Summer Undergraduate Research Scholars program. In this program, undergraduates work with a faculty advisor on a topic of interest over a period of 10 weeks. Surveilled addresses the interplay between physical and digital information platforms, in the context of the examinations within Drones at Home. The piece interrogates the performative, biased nature of research and author/producership, and ultimately puts Calit2 itself under surveillance – questioning how the institution handles an unmanned intervention.

Ian Alan Paul, artist and researcher at b.a.n.g. lab in the Fall quarter, will present Do Not Kill Registry, a digital artwork which focuses on the visual rhetorics used to interpolate the human subject as well as post-national expressions of Human Rights.

This artist panel is part of the second of three performative workshops, which are month-long residencies when the artist and collaborators will develop new work in the gallery spaces, using the space as a test site, with the gallery open to visitors during scheduled hours.



SPEAKER BIO:
Ricardo Dominguez is a co-founder of The Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT), a group that developed Virtual-Sit-In technologies in 1998 in solidarity with the Zapatista communities in Chiapas, Mexico. He is co-Director of Thing (thing.net), an ISP for artists and activists. His recent Electronic Disturbance Theater project with Brett Stalbaum, Micha Cardenas and Amy Sara Carroll, the Transborder Immigrant Tool (a GPS cellphone safety net tool for crossing the Mexico/U.S border) was the winner of a Transnational Communities Award funded by Cultural Contact, Endowment for Culture Mexico-U.S. and handed out by the U.S. Embassy in Mexico, also funded by Calit2 and two Transborder Awards from the UCSD Center for the Humanities.

Dominguez is an Associate Professor at UCSD in the Visual Arts Department, a Hellman Fellow, and a Principal/Principle Investigator at Calit2 (http://bang.calit2.net). He is also co-founder of PARTICLE GROUP with artists Diane Ludin, Nina Waisman, and Amy Sara Carroll. A gesture about nanotechnology entitled Particles of Interest: Tales of the Matter Market (http://pitmm.net) was presented in Berlin (2007), the San Diego Museum of Art (2008), Oi Futuro, and FILE festivals in Brazil (2008). Ricardo Dominguez has just opened the Performative Nano-Robotics Lab in the new Structural and Materials Engineering (SME) building and research center at UCSD.

Sean Estelle is a 4th-year undergraduate student at UCSD, studying Theatre and Visual Arts (Studio). He has been working in the gallery@calit2 for the past year as a Gallery Assistant and Tour Guide. He has been part of many UCSD Theatre productions, including reasons to be pretty and The Seagull. His studio practice, which was featured last year in the UCSD Undergraduate Visual Arts show, focuses on the transformation of space, both physical and virtual, with performative interventions including installation, sculpture and live performance. He will be continuing this work in the coming year as part of the Visual Arts Studio Honors Program.

Ian Alan Paul is a writer, artist and programmer living in the Bay Area of California. His past work has dealt with the topics of border violence, biopolitics and prefigurative social movements. The current research of Paul focuses on feminist and poststructuralist critiques of Human Rights discourses, and more specifically on the visual rhetorics used to interpolate the human subject as well as post-national expressions of Human Rights. His work has been featured in The Atlantic, Al Jazeera, Le Monde, and USA Today, and has been exhibited in galleries in Asia, North America and Europe. He received his MFA and MA at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2011 and is in the process of completing his Ph.D. studies in the Film and Digital Media program at UC Santa Cruz. He can be found on twitter at @ianalanpaul.

Alex Rivera is a New York based digital media artist and filmmaker. His first feature film, SLEEP DEALER premiered at Sundance 2008, and won two awards, including the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. Rivera is a Sundance Fellow and a Rockefeller Fellow. His work, which addresses concerns of the Latino community through a language of humor, satire, and metaphor, has also been screened at the Berlin International Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, Guggenheim Museum, PBS, Telluride, and other international venues. For more on the artist, visit http://alexrivera.com/BIOS.html.

Gregory Sholette is a New York-based artist and writer, who earned his MFA from UC San Diego in 1995. He is a founding member of Political Art Documentation-Distribution (PAD-D: 1980-1988), and REPOhistory (1989-2000), and author of the book, Dark Matter: Art and Politics in an Age of Enterprise Culture, Pluto Press, 2011. His most recent exhibitions include 15 Islands for Robert Moses at the Queens Museum of Art Panorama, and the Imaginary Archive: Galway, Ireland. He is the co-curator with Olivier Ressler of the exhibition Its the Political Economy, Stupid, at the Austrian Cultural Forum New York. An Assistant Professor of Sculpture at Queens College: City University of New York (CUNY), he is a member of Gulf Labor Coalition; The Institute for Wishful Thinking; and an academic adviser for the new Home Workspace Program in Beirut, Lebanon.

Trish Stone is a new media artist and curator, whose conceptual art projects have been exhibited locally, nationally and internationally. Her project, Things I Never Say, in which she used publicly accessible webcams in San Diego as a platform for public performance, was recently exhibited at Art Produce Gallery, along with an Outdoor Video Screening of videos curated along the theme of public space. Recent exhibitions include Angels Gate Cultural Center and the Oceanside Museum of Art. Trish Stone holds an MFA (2003) from California College of Arts and Crafts. She continues her interactive, interruptive, interventionist art practice in San Diego, where she serves as Tour and Gallery Coordinator for Calit2, UC San Diego. For more on the artist, visit http://trishstone.com.

MORE INFORMATION:
The artist talk is Oct. 23 at 5pm. The UNMANNED INTERVENTIONS performative workshop will be open during regular gallery hours from 11am to 5pm weekdays in the gallery@calit2 on the first floor of Atkinson Hall. Media contact: Doug Ramsey, [email protected]. To RSVP, contact Trish Stone, [email protected]. A second artist talk featuring all the artists, including Gregory Sholette, moderated by Ricardo Dominguez, will take place Nov. 1 at 5pm in the gallery@calit2.