Potluck Chat: Electronic Disturbance Theater, with mCenter and Breadboard

December 15, 2009 - 6:00pm - 8:00pm

Hi everyone,

This week we’ll be discussing border disturbance art, inter-American mobilities, and mobile technology with Ricardo Dominguez and Amy Sara Carroll of Electronic Disturbance Theater / b.a.n.g lab, from 6-7pm; followed from 7-8pm by a continuing discussion with Mimi Sheller, director of the new Center for Mobilities Research and Policy at Drexel University, and Dan Schimmel, director of Breadboard.

The Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT) developed the first Virtual-Sit-In technologies in 1998 in solidarity with the Zapatista communities in Chiapas, Mexico. The group’s recent project *Transborder Immigrant Tool* (a GPS cellphone safety/poetry net tool for crossing the Mexico/U.S border) – with Brett Stalbaum, Micha Cárdenas, Amy Sara Carroll, and Ricardo Dominguez – was the winner of the “Transnational Communities Award” funded by *Cultural Contact*, Endowment for Culture Mexico - U.S. and CALIT2, and was also awarded two Transborder Intervention awards from the UCSD Center for the Humanities. Project URL: http://bang.calit2.net/xborder

Joining the conversation by Skype will be:

Ricardo Dominguez, Associate Professor in the Visual Arts Department at University of California San Diego, Hellman Fellow, Co-Chair of the gallery@calit2, Co-Principal Investigator of the Transborder Project, and a board member of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics; and,

Amy Sara Carroll, poet, member of Electronic Disturbance Theater, and Assistant Professor in the Program in American Culture at University of Michigan, and affiliate of the Center for World performance Studies and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, with interests in Latin/o American performance and alternative cultural production critical theory, poetry, cultural studies and inter-American Studies.

Project sites:
site: http://gallery.calit2.net
site: http://pitmm.net
site: http://bang.calit2.net
site: http://www.thing.net/~rdom
blog: http://post.thing.net/blog/rdom

Joining the conversation in person will be Mimi Sheller, Professor of Sociology and Director of the new Mobilities Research and Policy Center at Drexel University (mCenter), Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Mobilities Research at Lancaster University (UK), and founding co-editor of the international journal Mobilities. The mCenter@Drexel combines interdisciplinary approaches to the study of travel, transport, migration, borders, and mobile communication into an innovative over-arching framework. The term mobilities applies to both the large-scale movements of people, objects, capital, and information across the world, as well as the more local processes of daily transportation, movement through public and private space, and mobile communications. Mobilities research entails interdisciplinary study of the infrastructures, flows, and policies that create the contexts for contemporary mobility (and immobility), including attention to mobility rights, mobility justice, and the new social inequalities being produced by the uneven distribution of “mobility capital.”

She is the author of the books Consuming the Caribbean (2003), which explores the relations of production and consumption in the transatlantic world from the colonial era until today; Democracy After Slavery: Black Publics and Peasant Radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica (2000); and recently completed Citizenship from Below: Erotic Agency and Caribbean Freedom (forthcoming, Duke University Press). She is currently writing a book titled Aluminum Dreams, which tells the story of aluminum and its impact on the material culture of mobility, lightness and speed in the 20th century United States, in its relation to bauxite mining, tourism, and military power in the Caribbean and other tropical regions. She is also co-editor with John Urry of Mobile Technologies of the City (2006), Tourism Mobilities (2004), and a special issue of Environment and Planning A on “Materialities and Mobilities”.

http://mcenterdrexel.wordpress.com/
mCenter@Drexel on Facebook
http://www.drexel.edu/coas/culturecomm/ccdept/faculty/sheller.asp

Also joining the conversation in person will be Dan Schimmel, artist, Director of the Esther Klein Gallery (EKG) at the University City Science Center, and Director of Breadboard.

Breadboard is a hybrid program at the University City Science Center that facilitates cross-disciplinary art exhibits, community outreach initiatives and special programs offering public access to a new generation of fabrication technology and workspace in an effort to empower individuals and convene communities around creative applications of technology.

Through a unique partnership with NextFab Studio Breadboard engages groups and communities at all levels of interest and experience. Breadboard programming combines 3-D printing technology, CAD-operated equipment such as laser cutters and milling machines with a collaborative workshop environment where artists, DIY enthusiasts, fabbers, hackers, community groups and students can share a computer station or a circuit board with business entrepreneurs, engineers, and industrial designers.

http://breadboardphilly.org/
http://www.facebook.com/breadboardphilly
http://twitter.com/bbphilly