Residencies: creative & activist workshops

Fall 2018

 

Poet, Educator, & Activist Eli Clare Residency

Graduate Student Lunch & Workshop | Thursday, October 11 | 12:00-2:00pm | Hart Hall 3201
Title: The Ableist Construction of Defectiveness
Description: Join Eli Clare in an interactive exploration of how the concept of defectiveness is used to strengthen many systems of oppression.
Reading to circulate: Chapter 2 of Brilliant Imperfection
Undergraduate Workshop | Wednesday, October 10 | 12:00pm | LGTBQIA Resource Center
Title: At the Intersection of Queerness and Disability
Description: What issues do disabled LGBTQ peoples face? What are the connections among ableism, homophobia, and transphobia? How do issues around queer disability identities fit into a broader intersectional social justice framework? Join Eli for an interactive workshop about these questions and more.

 

 

Previously on HATCH: 2017-2018 Edition


Toward Feminist and Queer Technologies: Critical Workshops for Unpacking Expertise and Skill-sharing Tactics

 

Ellen K Foster

 

Within maker and hacker cultures, workshops and informal skill-shares are a way to distribute knowledge, expertise, practices, and often help to build a sense of community. They also become a format in which to solidify ‘best’ practices and the expected ways to build Do It Yourself (DIY) technologies and prototypes. But what kind of knowledge might be produced when leading workshops that problematize or unpack the types of skills shared, how they are shared, who is involved, and what is considered ‘best’ practice and why? By using the workshop as a form of inquiry, we will enact experimental methods that allow analysis of dialogue, which opens during material praxis (Foster 2015). The intention is to de-center one, ‘best,’ way of doing things and to acknowledge the importance of many diverse and situated knowledges among community members and in relation to environment, tools, materials, and diverse experiences.

The intentions of this workshop follow from feminist and visionary science fiction, deep listening, and speculative design toward enacting a utopian (re)making of the world through a lens of maintenance, feminism, dialogue, and slow process. It also stems from various electronic waste workshops that play around with different forms of use, appropriations of technology, and the building of new or alternative infrastructures through unpacking the embedded politics of technology and technological knowledge. Modes of interaction will include story-telling, collective mapping, embodied sensing for interacting with technology, open skill sharing, and visionary writing/drawing/making. We will deconstruct the skill of soldering via a workshop for building sound devices toward new experiences of materiality. Concurrently and throughout we will discuss and unpack the skills we are sharing and projects we are enacting in thinking about consumerism, race, gender, socioeconomic class, (dis)ability, the politics of care, values other than efficiency for producing technology, how to define community, etc.

References:
Foster, Ellen. 2015. “Critical Workshopping: The Contact Microphone.” Hyperrhiz 12. http://hyperrhiz.io/hyperrhiz13/workshops-kits/contact-microphone.html

Schedule

April 16 | 5:30 -8 PM  | Workshop at Pence Gallery

April 19 12 – 1:30 PM | Hart Hall 3201 (Brown Bag Lunch)

April 20 1:30 – 4 PM  | Workshop at Pence Gallery

Photo Archive Here


 

The transfeminist performance group from Spain, Quimera Rosa will be in Davis over the month of February on a residency of their recent project Transplant. During the month of February, they will offer a workshop on DIY photodynamic protocols, craft an installation with processes and products showcasing Transplant and a final performance in collaboration with other transfeminist performers as well as participants in the workshop.

 

Feb 8-17: Quimera Rosa’s

Photodynamic Therapy Transplant workshop

During their residency at UC Davis, Quimera Rosa will facilitate a bio-hacking workshop. At the intersection of science and art, this DIY (Do It Yourself) or DIWO (Do It With Others) workshop will take participants through the steps to create different protocols in replication of work in the laboratory – Working with a specific case: HPV (Human Papilloma Virus) / PDT (Photo Dynamic Therapy).
This workshop may be of interest to geeks, bio-hackers, non-binary people, women, sex workers, and trans and queer communities.
Photo archive 

Winter Course

Course credit to work through multiple workshops is available through Science & Technology Studies. Students can sign up for 1- 2 units. CRNs:

  • STS 198 (undergrads): 72675
  • STS 298 (grad students): 72688

Workshop Schedule

  • Feb.8, Thursday @ 12pm – 3pm
  • Feb 9, Friday @ 3pm – 6pm
  • Feb 10, Saturday 12-6pm
  • Feb 15, Thursday @ 12pm – 3pm
  • Feb. 16, Friday @ 12pm – 3pm
  • Feb.17, Saturday @ 12pm – 6pm

The workshop will cover:

1. DIY/DIWO Lab

  • Introduction to the lab

  • Safety instructions

  • Introduction to the tools

  • Legal framework of biomedical work

  • Tools to research papers and establish protocols

2. HPV (Human Papillomavirus Infection) / PTD (Photodynamic Therapy)

  • Initiation of working with cells

  • Becoming onco-mouse – a trip through the biomedical mirror: bio-privatization, living models, and modified animals.

  • Study of the protocol of photodynamic therapy (PDT) with 5-aminolevulinic acid (ala) + led of 466 nm.

  • DIY replication models used to treat different types of localized cancers, HPV, skin problems, herpes or bacterial infections.

  • Notions of wavelength, frequency, power, and intensity.

3. Self-experimentation / Performativity as a Mode of Experimentation: “My disease is an artistic creation”

  • Deconstruction of the laboratory life: tools, protocols, and aesthetics. The performativity of objectivity and knowledge production.

  • Tools, experience, and experiments on how to ‘put the body’ in the laboratory. Situated knowledges, self-experimentation, and transdisciplinarity.

  • Questioning the borders: user/expert, subject/object, art/science, health/disease, public/private.

  • From ‘open the pill’ (of AIDS activists) to the ‘unhealthy body’ as a creative tool in deconstructing processes of normalization produced by notions of a ‘healthy body’


As a result of these past 3 weeks of residency and the Workshop, Transplant, my disease is an artistic creation, we would like to invite you to the opening of the installation and performance. Save the dates!!!
February: from Thursday 22nd to Sunday 25th
@ Nelson Hall

 

Installation opening. Thursday February 22nd

Thursday 5 pm. Artist talk, my disease is an artistic creation.
Engage with the practices and experiments of Transplant, and mingle in the bio-hack, performance-lab, ritual, study space we have nurtured at the Della Nelson Kitchen for the past month.
Installation. Friday, February 23rd.  Open to public, from 4pm to 9 pm
 
Installation. Saturday, February 24th. Open to public from 4pm to 9 pm.

 

PERFORMANCE: My Disease is an Artistic Creation.

Sunday, February 25th from 6 pm to 7 pm.

By Quimera Rosa,  participants to the workshop, and invited artists.
Poetic interventions and a time-space cross-section in the life of our performance laboratory.
 

what if…
HPV is an interspecies companionship,
genital warts signal flourishing erotics,
sexuality is a porous encounter without making any sense,
cancer is a microrrhizal sign to life,
and
pathology enacts the force of transient passions? 

 
Working with Quimera Rosa (kina and ce) in the workshop/lab/alchemcical space over the last few weeks it’s been really fabulous.  We’ve been working with kombucha, chlorophyll, mycorrhizae, and making cultures of all kinds (!) in petri dishes, enacting scientific protocols –  We’ve also been having great conversations about situated knowledges, consent (or the impossibility of consent) with plant forms, care, disease as artistic creation, biohacking, science and colonial histories, co-sensing, collaboration, feminism, sexuality, etc.

 


Jan 20 2018Zapatista ConCIENCIAS for the Humanity

As part of this year’s theme, Decolonizing Science Literacy, we are hosting a listening session of the Zapatista‘s ConCIENCIAS for the Humanity convergence.
We will listen and discuss the Zapatistas’ invitation to imagine the possibility of channeling scientific thought for the good of humanity. The audio will be in Spanish and we will have English transcripts.The listening session will take place at the Taller Arte del Nuevo Amanecer (TANA) in Woodland, CA, and is free and open to the public.
You can find English transcripts below
Saturday, January 20
12 pm – 3 pm
1224 Lemen Ave,
Woodland, CA 95776
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/394030387701959/
Lunch provided