Working with activists, artists and hackers, Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT) staged a virtual sit-in to stop the German government from using commercial airlines to deport undocumented refugees and immigrants. Ricardo Dominguez, EDT co-founder, will speak about the electronic civil disobedience action and its effect and reveal how activists can duplicate his efforts to fight social injustice in the USA and globally today.
Members of the UCI community and beyond are invited to attend this event free of charge Thursday, October 5, 2017, Doheny B, hosted by the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub 2017 Conference. Lunch will be provided. No RSVP necessary.
Dominguez, UC San Diego associate professor of visual arts, and his theater group first developed virtual sit-in technologies in solidarity with the Zapatista communities in Chiapas, Mexico, in 1998. More recently, he and his partners developed the Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab project (http://tbt.tome.press/) and the Transborder Immigrant Tool (a GPS cell phone safety net tool for crossing the Mexico/US border), which won the “Transnational Communities Award” (2008), funded by Cultural Contact, Endowment for Culture Mexico–US, CALIT2 and the UC San Diego Center for the Humanities. The Transborder Immigrant Tool has been exhibited at myriad international venues. The project, under investigation by the U.S. Congress in 2009-2010, was reviewed by conservative radio and TV commentator Glenn Beck in 2010, who said that it potentially “dissolved” the U.S. border with its poetry.