Category: Culture Criticism

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Art and Technology arts and technology conceptual art Culture Criticism Video Visual Arts

Anthropofagia, Forensic Architecture and the Ethos of Consent w/ Carmen Aguilar y Wedge & Dorothy Santos

April 8, 2021 episode for z\topia

Carmen Aguilar y Wedge, Co-founder, Creative and Experience Designer at Hyphen-Labs and I were guests on z\topia on April 8, 2021.

Highlighted Articles:
⦿ Anthropofagia: We’re All Eating Each Other
⦿ Walled Unwalled (2018) by Lawrence Abu Hamdan
⦿ ANTARCTICA (2019) by Syrus Marcus Ware
⦿ TogetherNet by xin xin

Learn more below and please visit this link to access this episode: https://vimeo.com/538126954https://vimeo.com/538126954

ZTOPIA is a webinar-format talk show where designers are invited to muse, speculate and poke at topics they’ve found on the internet. It’s an hour of asking questions and coming up with serious and silly ideas.

Music:
Chvrches – The Mother We Share (Moon Boots rmx)
soundcloud.com/moonbootsmusic/the-mother-we-share-moon-boots

We do not own rights to this music.
Please support our artists and musicians. Go buy their music and art.

Opinions expressed are our own, they do not represent the opinions of our employers

Thank you to all the essential service workers keeping us alive during the pandemic!

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Check out our past episodes on vimeo.com/showcase/ztopia

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All the videos, songs, images, articles and graphics used in the video belong to their respective owners and I or this channel does not claim any right over them.

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Categories
Art Culture Criticism

New Normal / Old Normal

christy-chan

I have been invited to be a panelist for a discussion titled, “Making Art in the Age of #45” as a part of public programming at Kala Institute. Bay Area-based artist Christy Chan invited me and I am constantly humbled and honored for these opportunities. In 2015, I wrote a review of Christy Chan’s performance for online art publication Art Practical. She will re-enact The Long Distance Call at New Normal / Old Normal – a performance and panel discussion. Tickets can be purchased for the event here.

Information for the performance and panel discussion appear below:

Performance starts at 7pm, Doors open at 6:30pm
Panel Discussions at 7:45pm or 10 min after the performance ends.

Admission 10 – $25 sliding scale
(Recommended Member $15, Students $10)
NOTAFLOF (no one turned away for lack of funds)

Kala Art Institute is excited to present New Normal / Old Normal, a performance and panel discussion on Thursday, September 6 at 7pm. Artist Christy Chan will present a re-staging of her performance The Long Distance Call followed by the panel discussion Making Art in the Age of #45.

Expanding on her own personal experiences and interactions with KKK members during her childhood growing up in rural Virginia, Chan presents The Long Distance Call, a re-enactment of phone calls between Chan and Miss. Anne, a KKK seamstress in Alabama. During the phone calls Chan convinced Miss. Anne to provide her with a custom-made Klan robe for her video work. Their unsettling yet banal phone calls tell the story of an unexpected interaction between two women, from trust gained to the eventual abrupt end of their communications. The Long Distance Call is performed by Catherine Lerza and Christy Chan.

The original phone calls took place in 2013 and the re-enactment was first performed in San Francisco at Southern Exposure in 2015, two years before the Trump administration took office and the KKK and extreme right became politically emboldened for the first time since the 1970’s.

Following The Long Distance Call, Kala will present Making art in the age of #45, a panel discussion with Ryanaustin Dennis (founder, co-director of The Black Aesthetic), Guillermo Galindo (composer, sonic architect, performance and visual artist), Christy Chan (artist), Favianna Rodriguez (artist) and Dorothy Santos (writer, editor, and curator). Panelists will explore how the role of the arts and artists working in race, class and political issues has evolved since Trump’s inauguration. The panel moderator is Bay Area comedian Dhaya Lakshminarayanan, winner of the Liz Carpenter award for political humor (previously awarded to Samantha Bee) and hosts The Moth in San Francisco.

Tickets are $10-25 sliding scale.

Categories
Art Culture Criticism Performance and Conceptual

Reading The Dispossessed

thediss_ukl

On Saturday, January 20, from 12-2 p.m. I will be participating in the second part of a two-part program, which will be a reading and recording of Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed.

Artists Danielle Aubert, Sofia Cordova, Liz Hillie, Courtney Johnson and I will read from The Dispossessed with an emphasis on the marks found in over one hundred used copies. Gallery visitors are welcome to sit and listen to the reading and to follow along with a used copy. This reading will be recorded.

To learn more, please visit the event link here.

Categories
Art Culture Criticism Curatorial Practice Observations

American Gun Show featured in KQED’s Fall Arts Preview 2015

AmGunShow_FallArts

“Liberator by Cody Wilson, printed by James Morgan.” medium: 3d print ABS, 2013

(Photo courtesy of the artist.)

Cherri Lakey for KQED writes, “Curators James Morgan and Dorothy Santos have put together an impressive exhibition of 22 artists from the U.S. and abroad to visually weigh in on the hot button topic of guns and all the territory that comes with it.” Please read the rest here.

Categories
Art arts and technology Conceptual conceptual art Culture Criticism Observations Post Modernism Sculpture Visual Arts

The American Gun Show

Call to Artists: American Gun Show

Open call for artwork:

Few technologies have had the impact on civilization that the gun has had. With a storied history of a millennium and having been woven into American culture, it is not surprising that it is as contentious as it is empowering.

Dorothy Santos and James Morgan are bringing together a series of works across media that consider all sides of this technology. From the historic use in war to the representations in photography, painting and film, we are also interested in the object as it represents an intersection of functional design and technology. We want to look backwards and forwards and seek works that express a viewpoint related to guns and/or the second amendment.

We are particularly interested in the reflections of underrepresented and underserved communities regarding the place of the gun in the United States. Our expectation is that these views are not often reflected in the public and mainstream media.

Our intuition tells us that there are more than two sides of this story, that there is a relationship between queer, trans* and other communities to guns.

We want to tell that story.

The show will take place from October to November of 2015 in San José, California. We are particularly interested in media based projects and visual responses to the topic.

Please respond via email with links to appropriate work to either ags@factorynoir.com or dorothy.r.santos@gmail.com before August 21 for full consideration.

Curatorial Statement

The gun is a thousand year old technology changed by contemporary prototyping and communication processes. The American Gun Show looks at cultural responses in the context of personal liberty at the intersection of our identity, as Americans, and relationship to the network and print-on-demand technologies. Cody Wilson designed a 3D printable single shot pistol in 2013 which he posted as a computer file online for the public. Within days the U.S. State Department demanded that the files be taken down. This dispute marks a significant event in both legal and technological history – the collision of the first and second amendments of the US Constitution. Free speech and personal liberty become central themes to The American Gun Show.

This exhibition is about the artists’ response to guns and, to a lesser extent, the design and aesthetics of the machine itself. The art and technology of guns as an objective focus for this exhibition has been a challenging one to meet, but the much needed dialogue around an object rife with cultural, social, and political meaning warrants examination through a multi-faceted lens. This show is an exploration of the American psyche and history steeped by gun violence. What is the political will of the American public to address the issues related this advanced form of weaponry? As curators, we explored artists, artistic practices, and expressions that can offer a form of neutrality or balanced perspectives on the issue of gun creation and control.

We understand and expect a wide array of reactions to the content and nature of the exhibition. To that end, people will find some of the work offensive or antagonist to either side of the debate. But we ask visitors to consider the work that resonates with them may have the same or different effect on another viewer. The American Gun Show is not anti-gun or pro-gun. Rather, the show seeks to drive more of a census on what can bring opposing viewpoints stemming from the existence of this object as a point of departure for effective legislation while respecting the rights of American citizens.

Categories
Conceptual Culture Criticism Interactive / Participatory Art Multi Media Observations Performance and Conceptual

Conceiving Place // In Coversation with Mabel Negrete at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

mabel-conceivingplace
  
When: Friday, August 7, 2015 
Time: 5:00pm– 7:30pm
Location: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Front Door Gallery
As a culmination of the public programming associated with the current Room for Big Ideas project, Conceiving Place, Bay Area-based writer Dorothy Santos will be in conversation with Mabel Negrete on her work and ask questions that focus on social practice, defining place, current social and political climates, as well as how the project has evolved since its inception. The conversation will be for one hour between artist and writer and 15–30 minutes of facilitated Q&A.The evening’s program will open with a ceremonial workshop led by Khalil Anthony: SONGS FROM PLANET ZERO
Join artist Khalil Anthony on a voyage in creation and song creation. Through this interactive workshop, participants will breathe together, and create music with only their bodies and voices as instruments. Learn to use your inherent rhythm and beat making ability to conjure songs as a group and by yourself, in this improvisational based workshop that pull songs from Planet Zero; a mythical place where all things are possible, as long as imagination and vulnerability meet.From writer Dorothy Santos – “We all carry the burden of punishment in our everyday lives. But at the economic, social, and cultural level, these burdens remain invisible. Whether they are through the taxes we pay perpetuating the prison industrial complex to surveillance technologies, we live in a world where we are unable to truly navigate away from digital and physical landscapes withoutconsequence. MabelNegrete coined the term ‘invisible punishing machines’ as a response to narratives around imprisonment, political oppression, and systems of government. Her work relies on vulnerability, storytelling, and experiential practices that have resulted in works such as The Weight I Carry with Me (2010 – Ongoing) to her founding the research initiative Counter Narrative Society (CNS). The breadth of her work has served as an impactful project that aims to reverse dominant narratives that diminish the untold and often obscured stories of underrepresented and vulnerable populations.”See the entire August 2015 workshop schedule at http://thinkeringschool.sparkmakers.org/july-aug-2015-thinkering-activities/Part of the exhibition, Conceiving Place:

Through a series of public workshops, Conceiving Place will engage the Bay Area community in a conversation about our personal and societal narratives; ultimately turning the weight we individually carry into a communal work. This ever-evolving installation will also frequently include “hands on, minds on” experiences. See more at http://ybca.org/conceiving-place

Artist Mabel Negrete, the founder of Counter Narrative Society (CNS), is a multi-disciplinary artist exploring counter narratives about bio-power, urbanism, culture, and technology. Her project The Weight I Carry with Me is a reaction to the invisible punishing machine, an idiomatic, science fiction-esque research concentration she designed to examine the spatial and technological causes that produce inequality and invisible punishment — a consequence of mass imprisonment, political persecution of individuals, the prison-welfare system, urbanization, neoliberal policies, and social-urban control in the USA. She is a recipient of several recognitions including MIT Presidential Award 2009-2010 and MIT Architecture Department Fellowship 2009-2011, Zellerbach Family Foundation & W.A. Gerbode Foundation 2006, and Osher Memorial Merit Scholarship – San Francisco Art Institute 2003-2006. Her work has been presented in a variety of public spaces and cultural institutions: Boston City Hall, MA; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MA; Art of this Gallery, MI; De Young Museum, CA, The Intersection for the Arts, CA; Galleria de la Raza, CA; Primo Piano Living Gallery, Lecce Italy; New College of California, CA; San Francisco World Affairs Counsel, SF; and University of San Francisco, CA.