Author Archives: tedxcalarts

Guillermo Gómez-Peña

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450Guillermo Gómez-Peña was born in Mexico City and moved to the US in 1978, where he established himself as a performance artist, writer, activist, and educator. He has pioneered multiple media, including performance art, experimental radio, video, performance photography and installation art. His eight books include essays, experimental poetry and chronicles in both English, Spanish and Spanglish.

Most of his artistic and intellectual work concerns the interface between North and South (Mexico and the U.S.), border culture and the politics of the brown body. His original interdisciplinary arts projects and books explore borders, physical, cultural and otherwise, between his two countries and between the mainstream U.S. and the various Latino cultures: the U.S.-Mexico border itself, immigration, cross-cultural and hybrid identities, and the confrontation and misunderstandings between cultures, languages and races. His artwork and literature also explore the politics of language, the side effects of globalization, “extreme culture” and new technologies from a Latino perspective.  He is a patron of the London-based Live Art Development Agency.  Gómez-Peña received both his B.A. (1981) and M.A. (1983) from California Institute of the Arts. He studied Linguistics and Latin American Literature at the UNAM (1974–1978, Mexico City).

The Yes Men

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Yes MenThe Yes Men are a group who use any means necessary to agree their way into the fortified compounds of commerce, and then smuggle out the stories of their undercover escapades to provide a public glimpse at the behind-the-scenes world of big business. The stories are often both shocking and hilarious. They have been called “the Jonathan Swift of the Jackass generation” by author Naomi Klein. The Yes Men have impersonated World Trade Organization, Dow Chemical Corporation, and Bush administration spokesmen on TV and at business conferences around the world. They do this (a) in order to demonstrate some of the mechanisms that keep bad people and ideas in power, and (b) because it’s absurdly fun. Their main goal is to focus attention on the dangers of economic policies that place the rights of capital before the needs of people and the environment.

Nora Chipaumire

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Nora ChipaumireBorn in Mutare, Zimbabwe and currently a resident of New York City, Chipaumire has been challenging stereotypes of Africa and the black performing body, art, and aesthetic for the past decade. She has studied dance in many parts of the world including Africa (Senegal, Burkina Faso, Kenya, and South Africa), Cuba, Jamaica and the U.S. A graduate of the University of Zimbabwe’s School of Law, Chipaumire holds an M.A. in Dance and M.F.A. in Choreography and Performance from Mills College (CA). Chipaumire is a 2012 Alpert Award in the Arts recipient and 2011 United States Artist Ford Fellow, and a two-time New York Dance and Performance (aka “Bessie”) Awardee. Her work has been supported by the MAP Fund, the Jerome Foundation, NYFA B.U.I.L.D., National Dance Project, NYSCA, The Joyce Theater Foundation with support from the Rockefeller Foundation’s Cultural Innovation Fund, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Chipaumire has been an adjunct faculty member at Arizona State University-Tempe, Bennington College, the University of Minnesota-Minneapolis, and Barnard College.

Sardono W. Kusumo

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Sardono

Sardono W. Kusumo (Indonesia) is a director/choreographer/filmmaker and lecturer at Jakarta Institute of the Arts.  Since the 1970s, not only have the works of Sardono W. Kusumo seen acclaim in his home country, they have been critically received in tours to Asia, Europe and the Americas and at major international festivals. Sardono’s work emerges from the pluralistic multicultural society that is modern Indonesia, informed by his classical Javanese training and his activism (most notably on behalf of Indonesia’s rain forests and the indigenous peoples who inhabit them). Formally trained in classical Javanese dance, Sardono has researched and explored multidisciplinary and intercultural pathways and worked with a diverse group of artists around the globe, whether it is the people in Bali, East Kalimantan and Nias, or contemporary artists such as Peter Brook, Arianne Mnouchkine and Eugenio Barba. His long-standing relationship with the villagers of Teges, Bali, has resulted in remarkable creations such as Dongeng dari Dirah (Sorceress of Dirah) that toured Europe in 1974. A film of the same name, choreographed and directed by Sardono and shot on location in and with the villagers of Teges, was completed in 1992. His environmentally based pieces Meta Ecology  (1979), Plastic Jungle (1983) and Hutan yang Merintih (Lamenting Forest) (1987) were the direct result of a relationship he had developed with the Dayak tribesmen of East Kalimantan. He has also created solo pieces for himself with Japanese composers Yuji Takahashi, Kauze Sawai and Takehisa Kosugi which have been seen in Jakarta, Tokyo, Osaka and Kobe. Sardono is a true pioneer. In 1968, he became the youngest member of the Jakarta Arts Council. In the late 1960s, Sardono founded Indonesia’s first experimental group. He has been with the faculty of the Jakarta Institute for the Arts (IKJ) since 1970. A recipient of national and international awards for his contribution to the arts, Sardono continues to travel regularly throughout Indonesia and act on issues of concern to him.

Ricardo Dominguez

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TBTPerformanceInterventionBorderRicardo Dominguez is an artist and associate professor of visual arts at UC San Diego. He has been the subject of controversy over a number of acts of electronic civil disobedience on his own and with the Electronic Disturbance Theater, which he co-founded with Brett Stalbuam, Stefan Wray, and Carmin Karasic.

Electronic Disturbance Theater, has organized “virtual sit-ins” that attempted to disturb websites with a program called FloodNet that automatically requests the target page over and over. These events sometimes incorporated a search term, such that the search would return a phrase like “Transparency not found” in the University of California, Office of the President website, or “human rights not found” at the website of Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo.  On one occasion, the US Department of Defense diverted a planned attack to a nonexistent website.  The “virtual sit-ins” were done in solidarity with Zapatista communities in Chiapas, Mexico.

In 2007 Dominguez also helped develop a phone app called the Transborder Immigrant Tool (TBT) with artists Brett Stalbaum, Micha Cardens, Amy Sara Carroll, and Elle Merhmand , which uses GPS technology to help immigrants find water stations in the Southern California desert and which also includes a poetry feature.  It raises awareness about the number of people who die in the U.S.-Mexico border region and aims to rethink the ways in which “immigrants are always presented as less-than-human and certainly not part of a community which is establishing and inventing new forms of life.”  TBT was subject to considerable controversy initiated by three Republican California congressmen; ultimately the University of California stated that TBT did not misuse research funds, but would not comment on whether it had broken any laws.

Currently, Dominguez is a Principal Investigator at CALIT 2, as well as, the Performative Nano-robotics Lab at SME (UCSD), and he is the Lead Researcher of the UCSD Center for Drone Policy and Ethics.

Ashley Hunt

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Hunt_IMG_9972-2AAshley Hunt is an artist, activist and writer who engages the ideas of social movements, modes of learning and public speech. His work is often concerned with questions of power and the ways that some people have more, others have less, and what can be done about that. Ashley’s works include the performance, Notes on the Emptying of a City, a ‘dismantled film’ that recounts his time in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina; Communograph, a multi-platform project of community authorship through Project Row Houses in Houston; 9 Scripts from a Nation at War, the collaborative video installation produced for documenta 12 with Andrea Geyer, Sharon Hayes, Katya Sander and David Thorne; On Movement Thought and Politics, an interdisciplinary collaboration with dance and performance artist, Taisha Paggett; and the ongoing Corrections Documentary Project, a body of work addressing the politics of growth in the largest prison system in the world — that of the United States. Recent exhibitions and performances include the 2012 Live Arts/Philly Fringe Festival, the 2012 Biennial in Sinop, Turkey, the Museum of Modern Art, the Made in LA, 2012 biennial of the Hammer Museum and LAX Art, and Woodbourne State Prison in upstate New York. Ashley co-directs the Photography and Media Program at California Institute of the Arts and just planted a peach tree.

 

Brian Massumi and Erin Manning

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Masssumi Manning

Brian Massumi is a Canadian social theorist. Massumi’s research spans the fields of art, architecture, political theory, cultural studies and philosophy. He received his Ph.D in French Literature from Yale University in 1987. His publications include Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation and Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts. He is also known for English-language translations of recent French philosophy, including Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (with Geoffrey Bennington), Jacques Attali’s Noise and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus.

Massumi collaborates with Erin Manning, director of the Sense Lab, a research-creation laboratory affiliated with Hexagram: Institute for Research/Creation in Media Arts and Technology in Montreal. They co-edit a book series at MIT Press entitled Technologies of Lived Abstraction and are founding members of the editorial collective of the Sense Lab journal Inflexions: A Journal for Research-Creation.

Massumi is currently teaching at Université de Montréal, in the Communication Sciences Department.

Erin Manning holds a University Research Chair in Relational Art and Philosophy in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada). She is also the director of the Sense Lab (www.senselab.ca), a laboratory that explores the intersections between art practice and philosophy through the matrix of the sensing body in movement. Her current art practice is centred on large-scale textile installations that facilitate emergent collectivities. She presented Stitching Time at the 18th Biennale of Sydney in 2012, will present Stitching Time – Traces at the 5th Moscow Biennale in 2013 and is preparing a work entitled The Knots of Time for the opening of the new Flax Museum in Kortrijk, Belgium. Publications include Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance (Duke UP, 2013), Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009), Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2007) and Ephemeral Territories: Representing Nation, Home and Identity in Canada (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2003). Her forthcoming co-written manuscript (with Brian Massumi) is entitled Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience (Minnesota UP).

Mirjana Jokovic

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Underground1995BDRip720pIta-1.mkv_snapMirjana Joković was born in Serbia, formerly a part of Yugoslavia. Mirjana started to work professionally as an actor in the movies and at the National Theater in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Soon, she was appearing in numerous television projects and as a lead at the National Theater. Three years later she appeared as a regular character in the TV series Grey Home, which is still known as one of the most distinctive works of television during the former Yugoslavia. In addition to her association with the National Theater and Yugoslav Drama Theater (two of the most prestigious theater groups in the country), Mirjana also continued her film career, for which she was recognized with Best Leading Actress at the Rio De Janeiro International Film Festival in 1988 and the Best International Actress of The Year at Spain’s San Sebastian Film Festival in 1988. Ms. Jokovic returned to Yugoslavia to take leads in a number of films, for which she was awarded five times in five consecutive years and recognized as the Best Actress of the Year (Empress Theodora Award) as well as the Best Female Lead (Golden Arena Award). During that same period, Mirjana also worked in Germany in 1989, taking the lead in the German-Yugoslav co-production of the film Serbian Girl directed by Peter Sehr. In 1993 Mirjana played lead roles in Underground directed by Emir Kusturica which won the Palme d`Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1995 and Critics Circle Award in the US in 1997 and Vukovar which won Mirjana another Best Actress of the Year Award. The journey in the U.S. began with the off-Broadway production of Lynn Nottage’s Mud, River, Stone directed by Roger Rees at Playwrights Horizons. U.S. theater work includes a Broadway production ofElectra, directed by David Levaux. In 1999 she participated in The Institute of the Arts and Civic Dialogue. From 1999 to 2001, she worked at the American Repertory Theater where she performed in Full Circle (Chuck Mee) (Dir. Robert Woodruff, Dule Grit), Winters Tale (Dir. Slobodan Unkovski), Three Farces and the Funeral(Robert Brustein, Dir. Yuri Yereman), Mother Courage and Her Children (Dir. Janos Saaz) and Othello(Shakespeare) (Dir. by Yuri Yereman). In 2001, she returned to the McCarter Theater for the production of Romeo and Juliet (dir. Emily Mann) and also shot the film A Better Way to Die (Dir. Scott Wiper) for HBO. Other off-Broadway and regional productions include Necessary Targets by Eve Ensler directed by Michael Wilson, Sophocles’ Electra at Hartford Stage directed by Jonathan Wilson and Three Sisters directed by Carey Perloff at ACT. In 2004 she participated in the Sundance Theatre Lab as well as a co-production between Flemish National Theater, Serbian National Theater and Theatre`Epique from Brussels, Belgium, in a piece called Trous – Rupe-Haten, directed by Lorant Wanson.

Peggy Deamer

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Peggy DeamerMs. Deamer is principal of the firm, Peggy Deamer. Prior to this, from 1986 to 2002, she was a partner in the architectural firm of Deamer + Phillips.  She is the Assistant Dean at Yale University’s School of Architecture where she teaches design and history/theory.  She has also taught at the Cooper Union, University of Kentucky, Barnard College, Columbia University and Princeton University, among other institutions.  She received her BA from Oberlin College, her BArch from the Cooper Union, and her Ph.D. from Princeton University.  Her design work has been published in Progressive Architecture, House and Garden, The New York Times Magazine, among other journals and newspapers.

Her Ph.D. was on the English 20th century art and architecture critic Adrian Stokes, who was analyzed by Melanie Klein and saw his aesthetic work as an extension of her psychoanalytic theories.  Deamer’s current work concentrates on how theories of form and architectural production – especially prefabrication and mass-customization – influence contemporary culture.  Articles written by her have been published in Assemblage, Perspecta, Architecture and the Everyday and Drawing Building Text, among other publications.  She is the editor of The Millenium House, based on a studio she taught at Yale.  She has served on the board of the New York Foundation for the Arts, Journal of Architecture Education (where she was Design Editor) and currently serves on the board of Storefront for Art and Architecture and Yale’s student journal, Perspecta.

Chris Kallmyer

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Chris KallmyerChris Kallmyer is an artist who makes sound with everyday objects to explore the processes, customs, and environments through which humans have altered landscape and place. He has presented work at the Walker Art Center, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, the Hammer Museum, the Getty Center, REDCAT, Machine Project, and other spaces in America and Europe. Chris lives in Los Angeles where he collaborates frequently with Machine Project, is a member of wild Up, and earned his MFA in music from the California Institute of the Arts.

Douglas Kearney

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KearneyPhoto_CreditEric_PlattnerDouglas Kearney is a poet/performer/librettist. Cultural critic Greg Tate remarked that Kearney’s National Poetry Series selection, The Black Automaton (Fence Books, 2009), “flows from a consideration of urban speech, negro spontaneity and book learning.” Crescent City, a hyperopera composed by Anne LeBaron, premiered in Los Angeles in 2012. A Cave Canem fellow, he has received a Whiting Writers Award, a Coat Hanger award, MAP Fund grants and several fellowships. Kearney teaches in the School of Critical Studies at CalArts, but has also lectured in the Music and Theater schools. Red Hen Press will publish Patter in 2014.

Franco Berardi Bifo

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Bifo

Born in Bologna, Italy in 1949, Franco Berardi Bifo is a writer, media-theorist, and media-activist. As a young militant he took part in the experience of Potere operaio in the years 1967-19073, then he founded the magazine A/traverso (1975–81) and was part of the staff of Radio Alice, the first free pirate radio station in Italy (1976–78).

Involved in the political movement of Autonomia in Italy during the 1970s, he fled to Paris, where he worked with Félix Guattari in the field of schizoanalysis.

He has been involved in many media-projects, like Telestreet, and Recombinant.org.

Bifo published the books Poetry and finance (1912) After the future (2011) The Soul at Work (2010), Felix (2001), Cibernauti (1994), Mutazione e Cyberpunk (1993) and contributed to the magazines Semiotext(e), Chimères, Metropoli, and Musica 80.

He is currently collaborating with e-flux journal.

Coordinator of the European School for Social Imagination (SCEPSI), he has been teaching at Ashkal Alwan in Beirouth, PEI-Macba in Barcelona, Accademia di Brera in Milano, and has been lecturing in social centers and Universities worldwide.

Ajay Kapur

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AjayAjay Kapur is currently the Director of the Music Technology program (MTIID) at the California Institute of the Arts, as well as the Associate Dean for Research and Development in Digital Arts. He received an Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in 2007 from University of Victoria combining computer science, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, music and psychology with a focus on intelligent music systems and media technology. Ajay graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Engineering and Computer Science from Princeton University in 2002.

Kapur has published over 70 technical papers and presented lectures across the world on music technology, human computer interface for artists, robotics for making sound, and modern digital orchestras. His book “Digitizing North Indian Music”, discusses how sensors, machine learning and robotics are used to extend and preserve traditional techniques of Indian Classical music.

Jeepneys

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jeepneys_1024Jeepneys is the musical performance persona of Anna Luisa Petrisko, a multidisciplinary artist residing in Los Angeles, CA and outer-space. Navigating through science (non)fictional terrains and magical landscapes, Jeepneys sows a deep spiritual connection with her environment, ancestors, and intuition to explore the infinite possibilities to heal through art and music.

www.jeepneysjeepneys.com

Aleshea Harris

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Aleshea Harris is an actress, playwright, poet and singer-songwriter currently enrolled in the MFA Writing for Performance Program at California Institute of the Arts.  As a spoken word artist and singer songwriter she’s performed at: The Studio@620, American Stage Theatre, The Knoxville Poetry Slam, The Poynter Institute at USF, First Night St. Pete, and at the Sacred Sounds Poetry Slam which she won in September of 2009, January of 2010 and May of 2011.  Aleshea’s work has been featured in Anatomy of Anger, (a collaboration with Art Not Hate founder Bob Barancik) and in the award winning short film God of the Ground, (a collaboration with Roundhouse Creative’s Andy Lee).  As a theatre artist she has performed in numerous productions including her own solo play Oddlie, which premiered at the Studio@620 in 2009 and received rave reviews at the Orlando Fringe Festival in 2010 and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2012.  Ms. Harris developed Bag of Beans Productions as a vehicle for sharing and making art (www.bagofbeans.net) and is proud to be an instructor of playwriting as part of CalArts’ CAP program.