[spectre] Transborder Immigrant Tool Videos "Transition" and "Precession" US Premiere at MIX NYC

[micha cárdenas]

"Transition", a video I created with the Electroncic Disturbance
Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab, including Elle Mehrmand, Ricardo Dominguez,
Amy Sara Carroll and Brett Stalbaum, is being shown at the MIX 24
Queer Experimental Film Festival, along with another video from our
group, "Precession". I'm so thrilled about being included in this
amazing program put together by Jian Chen.

MIX Factory, Greenwich Village, Manhattan, 45 Bleecker St @ Lafayette
New York, NY
Saturday, November 19 · 6:00pm - 7:30pm

>From different regions and diasporas, NOISE brings together
transgender/queer media insurrections in the globally networked
information economy. These media shorts focus on the gender and sexual
deviants, queer kin, street youth, activists, independent artists,
laborers, migrants, and cultural workers that occupy the informal
edges of conglomerate information infrastructures. More onscreen,
online stream than film, video, game, performance, television,
photography, or music, each piece exploits the interactivity,
mobility, and liveness of networked media, rather than preserving the
discrete aesthetics of medium, form, and genre. Together, they reject
the replacement of one normative set of icons, images, messages, and
protocols with another. And they flood the cocoons of atomized life in
the so-called Age of Information with noise.

NOISE Curator: Jian Chen

NOISE featured media shorts:

SOUND SPECTRUM (World Premiere)
Directed by Kenya Robinson
(2010, USA, video, color, English, 0:40 minutes)
Neither mourning nor celebrating the transition from image to
information, this piece shows the gradients of color, contrast, focus,
and signal that flow through so-called white noise.

AVENTURAS FAMILIARES (US Premiere, uncensored version)
Directed by Cheto Castellano, Daniel Benavides, and Lissette Olivares
(2010, Chile, video and animation, color, Spanish with English
subtitles, 29 minutes)
Journey from the countryside to the Santiago metropolis with a motley
family that includes ex-prostitute matriarch Trans, robber-clown
father Payaso, and porn star daughter Jot. Their epic search for their
family tree brings them head-to-head with cyborg agents of the
multinational media corporation that has seized the Chilean capital.

TRANSSEXUAL DOMINATRIX (New York Premiere)
Directed by Shawna Virago
(2011, USA, video, color, English, 3 minutes)
San Francisco underground muse, Shawna Virago, doles out lyrical
pleasure-pain with a sweet growl. This power-femme flashes a whole
arsenal of toys, singing “I do it for the leather, I do it for the
power, I do it for the pleasure of two fifty an hour.”

TRANSITIONS #NEWYORKCITY (New York Premiere)
Directed by Nadine Hutton
(2011, South Africa/USA, cell phone video, color, English, 6:12 minutes)
Drawn from the cell phone album of the director, a renowned South
African photojournalist, this cell video turns snapshots into
transitioning windows that capture the creative lives of New York City
transgender/queer artists. Playing with the limits of montage, these
moving cell images give impressions of a past-future, just shy of a
memoire, vignette, or narrative sequence.

TRANSBORDER IMMIGRANT TOOL: PRECESSION (US Premiere)
Directed by Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0 and BANG Lab
(2009, USA, video and animation, color, English, 1:37 minutes)
The Transborder Immigrant Tool, developed by Electronic Disturbance
Theater 2.0, retools GPS (Global Positioning System) for use on
low-tech cell phones to help immigrants crossing the US-Mexican
border. The Tool redirects technology used by nation-states to measure
territory towards a more universal cosmology of celestial navigation,
guiding human border-crossings across time.

PUMZI
Directed by Wanuri Kahui
(2009, Kenya/South Africa, video, color, English, 23 minutes)
This award winning science fiction film traverses the authoritarian
desert ecology of an underground city, struggling to preserve its last
natural resources in a futuristic Africa. In this parched dystopia,
sedated androgynous citizens subsist at minimum vitality, confined
indoors by command of the Maitu Council. A museum curator inside the
city's compounds attempts to escape outside, in the hopes of planting
a rare, if not extinct, seedling.

TRANSBORDER IMMIGRANT TOOL: TRANSITION (US Premiere)
Directed by Electronic Disturbance Theater and BANG Lab
(2009, USA, video and animation, color, English and Spanish, 1:37 minutes)
Far from just an instrument, the Transborder Immigrant Tool is a
mythic, poetic, and erotic recoding of technology. Re-oriented towards
the embodied, migrant user of the cell phone, the Global Positioning
System (GPS) can be re-rooted in the cellular and transcendental
“tradition of migration, a tradition of long walks.”

BATH OF DIONYSIS (New York Premiere)
Directed by Yozmit
(2010, USA, video, color, Korean and English, 5:28 minutes)
Singer, performance artist, and costume designer Yozmit teleports us
into a labyrinth, where we witness an initiation through ritual bath.
Yozmit’s haunting voice, evoking traditional Korean pansori, and her
metamorphosing body-costume revel in the interplay between beauty and
confinement.

Ticket and MIX information:

http://mixnyc.org

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=289671277717891



-- 
micha cárdenas
PhD Student, Media Arts and Practice, University of Southern California
Provost Fellow, University of Southern California

MFA, Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego
MA, Communication, European Graduate School

Co-Author, Trans Desire / Affective Cyborgs, Atropos Press, http://is.gd/daO00

HASTAC Scholar, http://hastac.org

blog: http://transreal.org