my god.

some of us in performance studies are accused of believing everything is performance. i stand more or less guilty as charged, which is why i am so fricking excited that there is an International Society For Performance Improvement. and that it is in los angeles.

bounty

from wired:

today in nerd history: April 29, 1964: Godzilla, Mothra Clas for First Time.

ray guns?

no, i have not played GTA4 yet.

also (because i googled "Wii Pilates" on the off-chance someone could make it happen): this was certainly inevitable.

CFP: Material Effects on Religion on Bodies

i'm a big ann pelligrini fan.



Religion Matters:
Material Effects of Religion on Bodies

Keynote Address by Professor Ann Pellegrini

The Religious Studies Roundtable at The Ohio State University is pleased to announce the first in what it hopes will become a series of Annual Graduate Student Conferences, to be held OCTOBER 4, 2008. The conference, "Religion Matters: Material Effects of Religion on Bodies," seeks to explore the effects of religion on the body, as well as collective bodies (like the nation), from a wide range of scholarly approaches.

The keynote address will be delivered by Ann Pellegrini, Associate Professor of Performance Studies and Religious Studies at New York University. Professor Pellegrini's interests include religion, sex and the law; queer theory; trauma and the performance of witnessing; and religion and performance. Her books include Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race (1997); Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance (2003), co-authored with Janet R. Jakobsen; and Secularisms (2008), co-edited with Janet R. Jakobsen. Professor Pellegrini's talk will address "queer structures of religious feeling."


A 19-year-old boy refuses a life saving transfusion. Monks resist government attempts to put down a diseased cow. A cancer patient finds healing in alternative forms of treatment. An abortion clinic is bombed. Each of these is an example of the tangible and material effects of religion on the body in daily life. This conference seeks to explore the actual, daily, lived presence of religion in the world, both past and present. We especially welcome submissions about topics that might not, at first glance, be considered religious. Submissions are not limited to scholarly, non-fiction pieces but may include fiction, performance pieces or any other
format that address the topic. Topics may include but are not limited to:

• the consequences of belief for the body: sexual, medical, political, legal, ethical, physiological, psychological, etc.
• disciplinary techniques of the body
• the effect of cultivation, meditation and practice on the body
• religious affects and intensities
• religious trauma
• religious and bio-politics in a time of war
• bodily modifications
• the relationship between corporeality and spirituality, religion, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity

In order to keep the conference unified while allowing for the greatest range of topics, focus should be on some material effect resulting from or explained at least in part by religion. Abstracts of no more than 500 words should be sent to van-kley.2@osu.edu by JUNE 1, 2008. Submissions should be prepared for blind review. Proposals should not include any identifying
names. Contact information should only be in the body of the email and should include your name, email address, mailing address, institution and title of your paper. Please put the title of the conference 'Religion Matters' in the subject line of your emailed abstract. Any questions can be addressed to Bridget Buchholz (buchholz.21@osu.edu) or Rita Trimble (trimble.38@osu.edu).

boob raider.

clicking around from wired's "7 Reasons your Boss Should Send You To Sex Conferences" led to this blog (warning, adult content, yadda yadda), on gaming and sex. the most recent post was about a kind of yawny strip-blackjack game (with the necessary three female avatars shown in some sense of undress), but earlier came an intriguing description of an "adult" RPG, in which "Raidy, a high-spirited female sword-fighter," travels around with the usual motivations.

>>When she comes upon a town plagued by monsters who steal away the beautiful maidens and turn them into their slaves, Raidy is determined to set things right, risking life, limb, and virginity to do battle with the denizens of the tower.<<

virginity, huh? something tells me that precious-and-irreplaceable jewel doesn't last long.

>>With the "sex if you win, sex if you lose" game system, Raidy is able to turn the twisted fetishes of the boss monsters against them if she defeats them in combat, or succumb to their wiles if she loses.<<

i'm not sure what "turn the fetishes" means, but interesting that sex is both a prize and a punishment. and, obviously, i haven't played the game, but it seems likely that what shifts here isn't the sex itself, but the subject position of the hyper-sexualized female character: successful, she's a randy Raidy; in failure she's a victim of assault. does kind of a number on the madonna/whore binary . . . madonnas get martyred while the slut-bags move on to level 2.

i don't mean to focus on the sex-if-you-lose part of this; though it sounds definable as a representation of rape, as a representation it sounds more like a rape fantasy. though misgivings abound when a female character is shown as "deserving" unwanted sexual contact as a result of any action, this sort of negotiated scenario wouldn't seem harmful or out of place in a live action role play situation. and "succumb" itself is a pretty plastic word--good for describing a pleasurable, maybe play-acted vacation from agency; also good for putting a romance-novel varnish on actual assault. i guess it's the negotiation of the "negotiated scenario" that's key, and i'm thinking about how that works with gameplay.


omg! i didn't look at the gamebox:



i was picturing a sort of Xena-meets-Final-Fantasy mash up, not a lump of be-boobed anime sprites. snarf.

CAE's Kurtz exonerated.

maybe exonerated isn't the right word if charges are dismissed, but dismissed they wuz. the AP story about Critical Art Ensemble's Steven Kurtz, at University of Buffalo, made the NYU alumnae rounds yesterday:

>> A judge threw out charges Monday against a college art professor accused of
improperly obtaining biological materials for an exhibit protesting U.S.
government policy on genetically modified foods.

U.S. District Judge Richard Arcara ruled that the 2004 mail and wire fraud
indictment against Steven Kurtz, a University at Buffalo professor, was
"insufficient on its face."

Kurtz is a founding member of the Critical Art Ensemble, which has used
human DNA and other biological materials in works intended to draw attention
to political and social issues. His arrest drew protests from artists in
several countries who called the charges an intrusion on artistic freedom.<<

rest after jump.

or at least that was the plan; blogger's being recalcitrant. will fix later--google for the story in the meantime. eep.

tube meat, redux.

you know those PETA folk are soooooo fricking excited to have bacon again.

on taming.

hmm.

"fatal psychodrama"?

i'm disgusted.

also: no such thing as laundry elves.

gasp! parts of american idol are pre-recorded and martially policed!

>>“At the end of every performance you will stand on your feet.” That is one of the commandments offered by Cory Almeida, the indefatigable warm-up man who exhorts and instructs the audience for 15 minutes before each performance and during the numerous commercial breaks.

For the audience members who stand in the “mosh pit,” the area immediately in front of the stage, special instructions are required. “When you are applauding after a performance, we need your hands above your head,” Mr. Almeida said before a recent Tuesday performance. “Otherwise we can’t see that you’re clapping.” As he spoke other stage technicians offered more individualized guidance to mosh pit enthusiasts, including how to wave their arms from side to side over their heads during slow songs.<<

and attended by bused-in UCLA sorority women!

>>From the placement of local sorority members along camera sight lines to the instructions to the audience members about when to stand and how to wave their hands, “American Idol” is as scripted as a “reality” show dare be. . .

"We sometimes talk about this at rush,” said Courtney Lauwereins, a member from Laguna Beach, Calif. “Join Alpha Phi, and you might get to go to ‘American Idol.’ ”The show, of course, does not just throw a bevy of sorority women in front of the cameras and allow them to cluster as they may. Stage assistants choose specific women and place them where the hand-held cameras will swoop during performances. "<<

eew.

woah.

via bitchphd, but i'm sure this is everywhere:

"Beginning next Tuesday, [Yale art major Alicia] Shvarts will be displaying her senior art project, a documentation of a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself "as often as possible" while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages. Her exhibition will feature video recordings of these forced miscarriages as well as preserved collections of the blood from the process.

The goal in creating the art exhibition, Shvarts said, was to spark conversation and debate on the relationship between art and the human body. But her project has already provoked more than just debate, inciting, for instance, outcry at a forum for fellow senior art majors held last week. And when told about Shvarts' project, students on both ends of the abortion debate have expressed shock . saying the project does everything from violate moral code to trivialize abortion."

you can read the rest of the Yale Daily News story here.

and here you can read about some of the aftermath, including Shvarts's telling Yale deans that she did not purposefully inseminate herself and induce abortions, in which the project is variously described/written off as "a hoax" or a "creative fiction."

i've only dipped a toe into the roiling fen of outrage that is this matter's public record, but it does seem interesting that so much of the attention moves along did-she-or-didn't-she, should-she-have-or-not type arguments--a sort of J.T. Leroy re-dux. as Dr. B. says, "in other words, we absolutely cannot get past our sense of ownership of women's pregnancies." i'm sure ron athey gets some of the same commentary, but maybe not half so much paternalistic moralizing.

inflatables.

so, these guys were on campus the other day. actually, inflatable suits shaped like them with what looked like adolescents or very short adults inside.

along with a lot of folks waving very small flags with pandas on them, reading:

tibet belongs to china, and so do i!

hmmm.

viral marketing, pervasive gaming, "special ops."

via urbaniak:

"'A lot of what we do to some degree, and we’re not afraid toadmit, is trial and error. When you’re an agency that’s doing
stuff that’s never been done before, who knows what’s going to happen?'
-Jason Klein, founder, Special Ops Media."


authenticity: the ultimate strategy.

please don't go, girl.

if you, like most of the people i spend my days with, were born in the mid-eighties, this may not mean as much to you, but i am oddly charmed. also discomfited that i can't remember which one i liked. i think it was the youngest one. definitely not the one my husband refers to as "joey fat one."

battle of the titans.

nicholas kristof on sexism vs. misogyny. this one's been around for a while, i guess, and off my radar. i don't know kristof well enough to arrive with an opinion of his work already in place, but i can't tell whether i'm intrigued by the question--it's one i'd never thought to ask--or irritated by it. kristof seems (or professes) to be seeking out a useful lens rather than looking to create a neat arithmetic or argue arbitrary distinctions, and i like that move (despite his apparent desire to find the "root" of women's world-wide oppression. good luck with that). still, it's hard to imagine anyone successfully isolating misogyny and sexism as separate factors, much less vaunting one over the other as a more generally applicable concept--and a chicken/egg argument about the overdetermined nature of the oppression of women is exactly the kind of thing that makes me want to reach for a pitcher of martinis.

avatar machine.

via boingboing and kind colleague will bowling. man becomes stinkoman:


from designer mark owens:

"i'm interested in the how such a device would affect your behaviour . . . the psychology of the mask dictates that you behave differently if you feel an anonymity with yourself. . . . the whole idea is if you recreate the aesthetics of these [virtual] environments [like Second Life and World of Warcraft], do you transfer that behaviour . . . does that displace into the real world?"

test tube meat.

in vitro pot roast.

eew?

yay?

performative potsherds

there's an intriguing article by jane kramer in the new yorker this week, about the work of nadia abu el-haj. not my field, but a very exciting performance studies site as concerns the construction of the identity of place. pretty important place, too:

"She received her doctorate in 1995, and turned her dissertation into a book called 'Facts on the Ground: Archeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society' . . . . The book looked at the role of archeology in what was essentially a political project: the Biblical validation for Jewish claims to what is now Israel. Specifically, it traced the history of a persistent 'grammar of biblical recovery . . . increasingly recast within the terms of Jewish national revival and return,' and the ways in which that grammar had produced a particular 'reading' of ancient stones, potsherds, inscriptions, and even bones by the scientists who unearthed them--or as one member of the Jewish Palestinian Exploration Society put it, in the nineteen-forties, 'Pottery is not pottery, it is Eretz Yisrael.'"

full disclosure: i haven't finished reading the piece. but abu el-haj's struggle for tenure in the face of her seemingly clear scholarly achievement is its own site for a discussion of performance. the article's not online, sadly, but you can read about george clooney.