KEYNOTE

DAY ONE: Constanza Piña Pardo

Visual artist, dancer and researcher, focused on experimentation with electronic media, free technologies and DIWO methodologies. Her artistic proposals are presented in various formats integrating dance, installation, sound performance and social practices. Her work explores noise as a sound, political and cultural phenomenon. She reflects on the role of machines in our culture and the human/non-human technological units, questioning the academy, capitalism, anthropocentrism and techno-heteropatriarchy as opposition to open knowledge, autonomy and enhancement of technical manual work.

Interested in recycling, hardware hacking, soft-circuits, DIY Antennas, handicrafts synths, ancestral technologies and electronic wizardry, generates her sound project Corazón de Robota (She-Robot Heart) with synthesizers DIY, where she explores the field of audible and inaudible frequencies as physical perceptions, vibrations as cosmic messages, noise and arrhythmia.

Her work has been presented throughout Latin America, US, Canada, Europe and Taiwan.

She has been awarded honorable mention in the Ars Electronica 2020 award for her project Khipu/ Electrotextile Prehispanic Computer.

She is part of several women and dissidence collectives such as the art and technology laboratory Chimbalab (2009-2011) Híbridas y Quimeras: Mujeres en la experimentación sonora y electrónica (2018-2022) and is Founder of the Encuentro Tecnofeminista Cyborgrrrls in Mexico City (2017-2022) and festival Fuck the soundcheck! Against sexist violence in soundchecks (2019-2022).

Constanza lives and works nomadically and embodies free culture philosophy, electronic anarchy and technofeminism, her research on handmade synthesizers and electrotextiles can be seen documented on her blog http://www.corazonderobota.wordpress.com

DAY TWO: Surveillance Capital And Occupation: A Conversation With Amahl Bishara, Darren Byler and Mohamad Junaid

Amahl Bishara is an anthropologist of media, journalism, settler colonialism, the Middle East, expressivity, human rights, knowledge production, democracy, knowledge production, and the ethnography of place. Her first book, Back Stories: U.S. News Production and Palestinian Politics (Stanford University Press 2013) is an ethnography of production of US news during the second Palestinian Intifada. It asks what we can learn about journalism and popular political action when we place Palestinian journalists at the center of an inquiry about U.S. journalism. In addition to academic writing, she also regularly writes for such outlets as Jadaliyya, Middle East Report. She has produced the documentary “Degrees of Incarceration” (2010), an hour-long documentary that explores how, with creativity and love, a Palestinian community responds to the crisis of political imprisonment. She is currently working on two book projects. The first, tentatively entitled “Permission to Converse: Laws, Bullets, and other Roadblocks to a Palestinian Exchange,” addresses the relationship between Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians in the West Bank, two groups that are positioned slightly differently in relation to Israeli settler-colonialism. Her second ongoing project examines Palestinian popular politics in a West Bank refugee camp.

Darren Byler is an anthropologist and Assistant Professor of International Studies at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia. He is the author of Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City (Duke University Press 2022) and In the Camps: China’s High-Tech Penal Colony (Columbia Global Reports 2021). His current research interests are focused on infrastructure development, policing and carceral systems, and global China.

Mohamad Junaid is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in North Adams, MA. His current book project, titled “Rebel Dreams: Postcolonial Empire and Political Subjectivity in Kashmir,” is an ethnographic account of the post-1947 movement for self-determination in Indian-controlled Kashmir.

His work on military occupation, space, and memory has appeared in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Identities, The Funambulist, and several edited volumes and anthologies, including Everyday Occupations: Experiencing Militarism in South Asia and the Middle East (2013); Resisting Occupation in Kashmir (2018); Until My Freedom Has Come (2012); Of Occupation and Resistance(2013); A Desolation Called Peace (2019); and The Hanging of Afzal Guru (2013). His essays on contemporary politics in Kashmir have also appeared in Al-Jazeera, TRT World, and Guernica.

DAY THREE: Aimee Meredith Cox

Associate Professor of Anthropology at New York University. Previously, she was jointly appointed in the Departments of Anthropology and African American Studies at Yale University. Cox earned her M.A. and PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Aimee’s first monograph, Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship (Duke 2015), won the 2017 book award from the Society for the Anthropology of North America and a 2016 Victor Turner Book Prize in Ethnographic Writing. She is also the editor of the volume, Gender: Space (MacMillan, 2018). Aimee is a dancer and choreographer. She performed and toured internationally with Ailey II and the Dance Theatre of Harlem and has choreographed performances as interventions in public and private space in Newark, Philadelphia, and Brooklyn.