DRONES AT HOME - Phase 3

Guest Speaker: Matthew Battles, Managing Editor and Curatorial Practice Fellow Co-founder, HiLowBrow.com; Research Fellow, metaLAB, Harvard Date: June 6th, 2012 Time: 5pm-8pm Location: Calit2 Auditorium, Atkinson Hall, UC San Diego Host: Jordan Crandall [event website]

DESCRIPTION/ABSTRACT: Matthew Battles, co-founder of HiLoBrow.com and UCSD prof. Ricardo Dominguez, will explore the poetry of drones for the summer launch of Phase 3 of the DRONES AT HOME exhibition in the gallery@calit2. Matthew Battles is the author of The Feral Drones, the poem featured in the exhibition. Battles will explore the poetry of drones, which reaches back further than one might think, through the rhythmic dance of quadcopters and the dreamy suicides of smart bombs to the poetry of Robert Frost, William Butler Yeats, and Gerald Manley Hopkins; through our early attempts to imagine the world in the eyes of animals to the artist Theo Jansen’s Strandbeests, the lonely odysseys of the Voyager spacecraft and the Mars Rovers, and the uncanny affordances of networked machine vision. According to Battles, "perhaps in drones we catch a glimpse, uncanny and yet reassuring, of the poetry that comes after us." Ricardo Dominguez will speak on Zombie Drones, or (Twice-Told Tele-Tales). SPEAKER BIO: Matthew Battles is a poet, writer, and co-founder of HiLobrow.com. He has written about technology, natural history, and networked culture for a variety of publications, including the Atlantic Monthly, the Boston Globe, the Christian Science Monitor, and Harper’s. His forthcoming books include Letter by Letter (W. W. Norton), a sentimental and natural history of writing, and a short story collection, The Sovereignties of Invention (Red Lemonade). He is a research fellow with metaLAB, an academic and creative collaborative devoted to the exploration of technology in the arts and humanities, hosted by Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Ricardo Dominguez is a co-founder of The Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT), a group that developed Virtual-Sit-In technologies in 1998 in solidarity with the Zapatista communities in Chiapas, Mexico. His recent Electronic Disturbance Theater project with Brett Stalbaum, Micha Cardenas, Dr. Amy Sara Carroll (University of Michigan), and Elle Mehrman, the Transborder Immigrant Tool, a GPS cellphone safety net tool for crossing the Mexico/U.S border, was the winner of "Transnational Communities Award" (2008). This award was funded by Cultural Contact, Endowment for Culture Mexico - U.S. and handed out by the U.S. Embassy in Mexico. The project was also funded by Calit2 and received two Transborder Awards from the UCSD Center for the Humanities. The Transborder Immigrant Tool was exhibited at 2010 California Biennial (OCMA), Toronto Free Gallery, Canada (2011), the project was also under investigation by the U.S. Congress in 2009/10, and was also reviewed by Glenn Beck in 2010 as a gesture that potentially "dissolved" the U.S. border with its poetry. Ricardo is an Associate Professor at UCSD in the Visual Arts Department, a Hellman Fellow, and Principal/Principle Investigator at Calit2 (http://bang.calit2.net). He is also co-founder of particle group, with artists Diane Ludin, Nina Waisman, Amy Sara Carroll, an art project about nano-toxicology entitled Particles of Interest: Tales of the Matter Market that has been presented in Berlin (2007), the San Diego Museum of Art (2008), Oi Futuro, Brazil (2008), CAL NanoSystems Institute, UCLA (2009), Medialab-Prado, Madrid (2009), Nanosferica, NYU (2010), and SOMA, D.F.,Mexico (2012). MORE INFORMATION: The opening session and poetry reading will be followed by a gallery@calit2 reception from 6-8pm.