Article called: "THE ANTHROPOCENE DEBATE: ON THE LIMITS OF COLONIAL GEOLOGY"

https://ahuja.sites.ucsc.edu/2016/09/09/the-anthropocene-debate-on-the-limits-of-colonial-geology/

Seems potentially relevant to our readings?

"Despite all its weaknesses, the anthropocene debate should force geology to confront investigators’ relationships to processes of geological change they measure, akin to the challenges posed by quantum mechanics to physics at the dawn of the nuclear age. It should reckon with the field’s colonial inheritances, which make geology, like all colonial science, an impure science that cannot be understood outside of the context of the relations of place, labor, and production that mobilize it. Geology is a spawn of the colonial capitalist assemblage that is rapidly transforming the planet, and whether or not geologists formalize ‘anthropocene,’ the discipline cannot stand objectively outside the relations that term clumsily attempts to name."

Machine Project: Upgrade Available

Relevant to our upcoming unit, check out this Machine Project event:

Come to Machine Project Saturday, October 22nd at 8pm for a lecture by Julia Christensen on her project, Upgrade Available, investigating why our relationships with technology are so complex, and how we deal with our electronics once they are obsolete.

Julia has traveled the globe tracking the physical movement of our electronic goods as they transition into e-waste, and examining the cultural implications of this untenable system. Christensen’s talk unravels the narrative of her international journeys and the resulting art works they’ve inspired, tying the global aggregate of e-waste back to our everyday lived experience with technology.   More info here.

BLM-Los Angeles announcing that October's General Meeting

Limit datamining on Facebook

Here's a simple explanation of how to limit datamining of your FB feed by 3rd party companies.

http://uk.businessinsider.com/facebook-apps-tracking-accessing-data-2016-9?r=US&IR=T

V + V Activist Workshop

Resist! A Workshop on Student Activism with DarkMatter

 Friday, October 21, 2016 at 12 pm
 Parkside Performance Cafe 
3771 S. McClintock Ave Los Angeles, CA 90007

Refreshments will be provided.

http://visionsandvoices.usc.edu/events/listing.php?event_id=773918

ADMISSION:
Admission is free. Reservations required. RSVP beginning Monday, September 19, at 9 a.m.

USC Students, Staff, and Faculty: RSVP 

DESCRIPTION:
Join us for a workshop on student activism with Trans South Asian performance-art duo DarkMatter, featuring Alok Vaid-Menon and Janani Balasubramanian. Drawing from their experience working on campaigns for gender justice, anti-militarism, racial and economic justice, and environmental justice, DarkMatter will present a workshop focused on skill-building and theoretical frameworks for student activism. Taking an intersectional approach to issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality, they will explore how the university system keeps us reading rather than revolting. The workshop will also look at the ways universities can generate apathy and inaction, and how the university can instead be used to help promote social movements.

Based in New York City, DarkMatter is a pair of self-described “radical, freaky queers of color who are not proud in the ways that the white gay establishment wants us to be.” DarkMatter regularly performs to sold-out houses at venues such as La MaMa Experimental Theatre, The Brooklyn Museum, and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. They were recently part of the Public Theater’s Under the Radar festival, Lincoln Center’s La Casita festival, and the Queer International Arts Festival.

Art opening this weekend

Seduction of a Cyborg 
Exhibition Dates: October 7-23, 2016
Opening Reception: Saturday, October 8, 7-10pm 

Human Resources Los Angeles
410 Cottage Home Street
Los Angeles, CA 90012

Exhibition hours: Wednesday-Sunday, 12-6pm 
Free and open to the public. 

Seduction of a Cyborg explores intimacy, sex, and desire as related to technocratic fantasies of futurity, (re)production of bodies, and fractured selfhood in the digital age. The fictional and the virtual intersect, exposing narratives that activate, transform, and deconstruct our understanding of the networked and plugged-in subject. The exhibition springs from an engagement with the work of Lynn Hershman Leeson, a foundational feminist artist whose work has explored selfhood and technology for over fifty-years. The exhibition places special focus on Hershman Leeson’s feature-length film Teknolust (2002), in which a female bio-geneticist downloads her own DNA to produce cyborgnetic clones that subsist on sexually obtained Y-chromosomes and act as “portals” on the internet where users fulfill fantasies and dreams.

Seduction of a Cyborg considers this and other early works by Hershman Leeson as a point of inception in examining a range of practices by artists, which include video, photography, installation, and web-based projects. The exhibition presents historical and contemporary works that call on critical ideas of and around technofeminism, queer theory, and disembodiment. The erotic innuendo inherent in the politics and possibilities of nascent technologies, as well as a longing for an era of low-fi and analogue, mark points of interest that extend from the 1990s to today. Other works realize fantastical and futuristic (gender) identities, presenting body parts that have been biotechnologically produced and avatar identities that assume mutable identities online. In the realm of the virtual, the imaginary knows no limits.

Artists in the exhibition include: Sadie Benning; Hannah Black; Johanna Breiding; Shu Lea Cheang; Linda Dement; Ricardo Dominguez, Francesca de Rimini, and Michael Grimm; Deanna Erdmann; Lynn Hershman Leeson; Faith Holland; Juliana Huxtable; Martine Neddam; Alexei Shulgin; Vertical Blanking (Kim McKillip and Michael J. Masucci); and Pinar Yoldas.


Seduction of a Cyborg is curated by David Evans Frantz, Hannah Grossman, and Simone Krug, 2017 MA Candidates in Curatorial Practices and the Public Sphere Program at the USC Roski School of Art and Design.

The exhibition will be on view at the Human Resources Los Angeles located at 410 Cottage Home Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012. Gallery hours are Wednesday through Sunday, 12-6pm, October 8 – 23, 2016. An opening reception will be held on October 8 from 7-10pm.

A screening of Lynn Hershman Leeson’s film Teknolust (2002), presented in collaboration with a shorts program curated by Dirty Looks LA, will be held at Human Resources on Sunday, October 16 from 6-8pm.