Published in Realtime Issue #127 June July 2015

SXSW Interactive 2015

Map Your World, The Revolutionary Optimists, Kolkata

In the space of two years between 2013, when I first attended, and 2015, content acceleration at SXSW Interactive has moved from innovative to exponential and something to write home about.

SXSW is a machine controlled by business; its body, its blood flooded with marketing psychology. The likelihood of brainwash is frighteningly real. Along with cranial lavage, you will need the stomach to attend. It’s also a bloodbath of free, independent thinking. You may leave as I did with a strange mix of adrenalin rush, rising nausea and the sense of hopelessness that any of us, individuals or groups, are free or have the capacity or sway to make social change anywhere in the world or that technology in any form ever was or ever will be good. Corporations have us, and our governments, well stitched up.

Although harder to find in 2015, it’s fascinating that there are gems of unique art and culture framed in this entrepreneurial context. There are conversations that coalesce activism, the senses, community, story and so much more. SXSW Interactive is a week of pure intellectual rigour, conceptual genius, leaps of faith, technical adventure and disruptive reality checks. I haven’t found such a combination anywhere else. In a minefield of charisma, brands, NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) and festival loot, let’s touch on a sprinkling of 2015’s offers dealing with some of our oldest compulsions: immortality, spirituality and revelatory technology.

Martine Rothblatt: immortality & AI selves

Martine Rothblatt is CEO and Chairman of United Therapeutics, author of Virtually Human: The Promise—and Peril—of Digital Immortality (2014) and of The Apartheid of Sex: Manifesto on the Freedom of Gender (1995). In her interview keynote for SXSW Interactive, part of the Art, Science and Inspiration program, she described her personal quest to alleviate the suffering of transplant patients along with a recount of other super achievements (like the world satellite radio Sirius XM) and of philosophies being forged by her scientific and technological inventions.

The project closest to her heart is based on xenotransplantation: a limitless supply of organs for immediate human transplant, created from genetically modified pigs—and prompted by her daughter’s then incurable lung disease [subsequently cured by Rothblatt and her collaborators]. Rothblatt reports that transplant survival with her new model has gone from hours to eight days. She suggests that once one month is reached, a year and longer will be not far behind.

Her side project is the creation of a digital clone of the human mind made from accessing mannerisms, recollections, feelings, beliefs, attitudes, ethics and values gathered from our digital traces—social media, emails. Google is currently writing mindware from this information. Rothblatt has created a proof of concept, BINA48 (2010), an artificially intelligent mind clone of her wife that inhabits a head and shoulders robotic bust of same. Where these projects and Rothblatt’s philosophies converge is in immortality where networked artificial intelligence enters a constructed living body, to replicate someone who has or already exists.

Reflecting our progress towards Singularity, our vocabulary of terms like “software-mind” is shifting to objectify the human and preference non-human in terms like “brain-based original” and “human-level consciousness.” Rothblatt is also a lawyer. The keynote brought to the fore Rothblatt’s agitation for philosophies and legal steps to provide identity law for future forms of life. A person can be natural or juridical (like a corporation). Wild law extends this premise to the Earth as a legal person with rights of jurisprudence. In Virtually Human, Rothblatt advocates for machine law and the machine as an identity.

I come out of this session, like many others, mind racing, exhilarated by human intelligence and accumulative knowledge yet sort of shattered: not really understanding tomorrow, alienated from fellow humans, asking why we desire the things Rothblatt proposes. I feel the incongruity of a new generation gap to come. Someone online asks, “Who pays to maintain this virtual self after the person it was created for dies?”Are these constructions responsible for their own survival or will they be wards of state? What are the economic drivers? At what point is the non-human reclassified as human? Questions to add to those for SymbioticA’s Neolife Symposium 1-3 October this year.

Rothblatt rolls out her vision as if it’s natural evolution. She makes sense, she’s rational, progressive, she’s emotionally connected, she has a family, is a political activist, founded a religion. We are frogs taking a swim in a satellite-connected waterhole of her making with very high sides, set over a flame.

Spirituality Through Interactive Technology

I found comfort at the Spirituality Through Interactive Technology panel, an intriguing gathering of cross-disciplinary humans in the audience: health practitioners, filmmakers, scientists and spiritualists. The session led with the premise that traditional interactive media has a bias for thinking from the perspective of the other, highlighting instead early trends that make space for “internal immersion” through self-perspective—that VR experiences in this vein are described with the word ‘presence’ and that VR is being used in new ways. And that presence and the intensity which people experience through these new experiences is producing happiness and empathy.

The conversation extended to neuroscience research by Olaf Blanke into perceptions of presence and other recent research suggesting that the brain is an embassy of the digestive system, not the centre but a creation of a more ancient system and placed at the periphery—our heads. There are after all more nerve cells in the digestive system than there are in the brain.

The session was run by interactive story architect and choreographer Michel Reilhec and Opeyemi Olukemi, Manager, Interactive at Tribeca Film Institute. Artists from the TFI program ANAGRAM (UK) hosted their own panel, with a pen and ink artist, on the junction of VR and physical artforms: How to Play with VR, Physical Spaces and Ink. The panel featured insights into Door Into the Dark, an immersive experience in personal documentary storytelling [in which lone participants become profoundly lost in the ANAGRAM installation, wearing a sensory deprivation helmet, travelling along a rope, cued mostly by touch and audio instructions. Eds].

Technicians of the Sacred: The New Native Apps

This session was convened by Wendy Levy, filmmaker and Executive Director, New Arts Axis, an organisation dedicated to facilitating creative innovation for arts, culture and human rights. Levy was previously in Australia for Hive Labs 2012. The panel focused on projects that bring tribal wisdom to the technology table, featuring two maps for action projects.

Save Wiyabi Mapping Project “aims to decolonise the anti-violence movement” and uses “digital feminism and technology.” Lauren Chief Elk, co-founder of the project, describes limitations in the collection of ethnicity data by USA authorities that document deaths. In the recent past only two data points were collected—a single ethnicity (Latino/Hispanic) or none. Death reporting is also governed by jurisdiction; there is no centralized data consolidation point. This creates a dark sinkhole for the visibility of genocidal femicide. The project is a map and database of missing and murdered Indigenous women that now invites global submissions. Australia is missing.

Another project, Map Your World is run with Google Maps and Earth. Presenter Eric Doversberger, Production Manager, People Analytics explained that the tools are open source with resources for project setup available, aiming to empower groups to create private or public maps populated with multiplatform story content. For example The Revolutionary Optimists, initiated by Indian lawyer turned social activist Amlan Ganguly. This has children in Kolkata conducting interviews about the health of water wells—location, colour, smell and who’s getting sick. In the beginning, they worked predominantly on paper. They collected so much data that they were able to make reports and petition for new wells. Another project led by Chief Almir, of the Surui tribe of the Brazilian Amazon, used the Map Your Indigenous Community to map traditional land. The model aims to close the gap between elders and young people and offers children new skills. A key outcome is Chief Almir’s ability to track and pinpoint illegal deforestation.

October each year is Map Your Indigenous Community Month. The project team will be visiting Australia to run workshops and talk to communities. Perhaps of interest for Australia’s war on terror and ‘lifestyle choices’?
SXSW, Austin, Texas, 13-22 March

After residencies at the Institute of Art and Olfaction in LA and with neuroscientists in Adelaide and travelling between botany, neuroscience, touch and scent via shamanic body illusions, Cat Jones is developing Somatic Drifts, a one-to-one experience that will preview at Hawke Centre Gallery, Adelaide, co-presented by ANAT, 20-25 July.

© Cat Jones; for permission to reproducer apply to realtime@realtimearts.net

RealTime Arts – Magazine – issue 121 – Dreaming Cities , published 2 JULY, 2014

In New York I can start a conversation mid-sentence addressed to no-one in particular and be sure that whoever is nearby will pick it up and carry on. I can walk the street, give directions to a stranger and end up at dinner with same, a dogma changing neuroscientist.

For me, New York is a place I can turn up in and feel like I’m home. A similar summer 11 years ago seasoned me with lifelong friend collaborators and artistic turning points. I was enamoured to see if we still feel the same way about each other. We do.

2013 was a year of cumulative cities for me, rolling in from a retro media art and feminism party reunion, Berlin; a winter retreat with plants and edible olfactions, Brussels; pounding through ideas, SXSW, Austin, Texas; spilling sensory performance and brittle papers, London; and balancing unbalance in Noosa. When I arrived in New York I carried the politics of touch from Performance Studies International 19, Stanford, packing stinging debates on methodology and mind blowing science from the Plant Signalling Conference, Vancouver along with a personal preview of Michael Marder’s Plant Thinking. Within four days of arriving I had an unexpected exhibition of my work in progress for Transcontinental Garden Exchange at point b. Simmer on high in the midsummer heat of New York for seven weeks. Season to taste.

So begins lucid dreaming in New York: public lectures on demand, Weird Wednesdays, behold intelligent slime mould, Secret Science Club, DNA sequencing, Genspace, library daze from florilegia to perfume, the Centre for Feminist Art, conversation with strangers, Live Sound Cinema, Amateur Night at the Apollo, rooftop thinking, urban foraging, the tall green of the Catskills shimmering in my ears, Beaverkill’s Ladybake Art Hole 3000.2 Extreme Croquet, art that grows, eats and sleeps out on the banks of the Hudson and the greenest queerest performance heroine introduction demand “Who is this eating my front lawn?”.

For all the links plus images visit RealTime Arts – Magazine – issue 121 – Dreaming Cities , published 2 JULY, 2014.

Published in Realtime 115 June July 2013

The Body in question: SPILL festival of performance, London

Walking: Holding, Rosana Cade photo Rosie Healey

Pacitti Company’s SPILL Festival is two weeks of sensorial encounter where the personal, political and mythological are transferred through the bodies of performers and audience. Sixteen of the 25 works are by women. The following three shots glide from wide, mid to hand-held, close-ups of the gendered, queer world we live in. If this opening has a certain eau de pussy, it’s an invitation to read on, not necessarily a warning.

Lauren Barri Holstein, Splat!

Splat! is the sound of 100 tomato juice filled balloons thrown and burst on a knife’s edge clutched by The Famous Lauren Barri Holstein’s vagina (insert handle first if you want to try this at home). It’s the sound of douche and douche again all over the chest and mouth of someone you care about. Give me a towel.

It’s a deconstructed post-fairytale in a forest inhabited by zombie Woodland Friends, where Bambi, canal birthed in a condom placenta, trophy mounted, rollerskates blindly through emissions, urinates near the vomit, near the target, on twins and hangs as a slaughtered carcass stuffing a burger in her cake hole. It’s a feminine schlock technical rehearsal on a closed Hollywood set with The Famous calling her own stage cues and requesting repeats. It’s a tower of cliché, ideology, genres and dispassionate delivery that might make you choke, with laughter.

You are shunted from wince to cringe to clenched sphincter then leant towards a performance precipice and asked with a hand held mike, “How do you feel emotionally, right now?” She has to go harder because you can’t feel it anymore. Do it again.

Splat! straddles porn, gets bulimic at the microphone, cleans and sticks the unstickable with tape. Its frame has a weft that might muddle your expectations of the next brown-eyed money shot—the sluiced mountain of images is planted with tender instructions, sensitive ballet pointe ballads, the full, uncensored, itemised budget for the show and the soft silence of long blonde hair clippings snowing gently down. Put that back together.

It’s a vulnerability fuck-over and The Famous Lauren Barri Holstein is in control.

Lucy Hutson, If You Want Bigger Yorkshire Puddings…

Lucy Hutson is the kind of cooking companion who makes her own personal recipe. In If You Want Bigger Yorkshire Puddings You Need a Bigger Tin she mixes sexual politics with a family focus group, body identity and a biography of gendered experiments into a disarming dish served as a dialogue between documentary video and contemporary performance, with the lights on.

In an era where queer women debate the actual choice made by younger women in transition, rather than the right to choose, Lucy Hutson offers a home-made brand of good old fashioned asexual identity that is delightful and refreshing.

In the same way you can make a food comparison by asking if your grandmother would recognise it, Lucy approaches gender transition by preparing to run it past the ladies at the Women’s Institute. No snips and no tucks, just a ball of wool, a roll of cling wrap, a shot of self-acceptance and the courage to live with fuzzy edges. The Women’s Institute would be proud.

Rosana Cade, Walking: Holding

I dare to keep my eyes closed on a busy London road and anticipate each swirl of density coming towards me as the moment Walking: Holding will begin. Rosana Cade’s delicate, cold fingers take mine for a walking story of same sex, mixed ethnicity, fag hag and other couples.

Cade and her serial strollers lead us through personal experiences to the point where self-consciousness can invade intimacy and hands meeting below the hip divide.

Rosana’s stroll takes us to an ironwork sign, “LADIES.” I walk with a young, cross-dressed man in a sweet floral blouse, flats and a touch of lippy, down a small dirty street where big men manhandle large tools. I’m released between a van and a tag wall where anticipation and ankles tip awkwardly on a pile of rubble. It’s funny how many loaded frames there are in nondescript locations. I hold the hand of a man whose story makes me clutch it. I stop breathing. This is close. We recover when he asks for, and I offer, something of my own that raises his eyebrows. We part at a sheened wall where the close reflection of our coded couple is joined to make three before it becomes a new two.

These walks take you past public displays of affection, and more: from the throwaway indulgence for heterosexual, Caucasian-matched, western couples, to the erosive emotional fallout of hand division for others and intimacy rarely touched between strangers.

Do you think we make a happy couple on these strange streets?

© Cat Jones; for permission to reproduce apply to realtime@realtimearts.net