zach blas
Queer Technologies is an organization that produces critical applications, tools, and situations for queer technological agency, interventions, and social formation. By re-imaging a technology designed for queer use, Queer Technologies critiques the heteronormative, capitalist, militarized underpinnings of technological architectures, design, and functionality. Queer Technologies includes, transCoder, a queer programming anti-language; ENgenderingGenderChangers, a “solution” to Gender Adapters’ male/female binary; and Gay Bombs, a technical manual manifesto that outlines a “how to” of queer networked activism. Queer Technologies‘ products are often displayed and deployed at the Disingenuous Bar, an attack on Appleʼs Genius Bar that offers a heterotopic space for political support for “technical” problems. Queer Technologies are also shop-dropped in various consumer electronics stores, such as Best Buy, Radio Shack, and Target. QT items are produced as product, artwork, and political tool and materialized through an industrial manufacturing process so that they may be disseminated widely.
SPECULATIVE is a curatorial project by Zach Blas and Christopher O’Leary that includes a group exhibition, performance event, panel discussion, and catalog presented at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions from June 16 – August 28, 2011. Speculative focuses on politically and socially engaged modes of art production, with an emphasis on the experimental, subversive, and tactical potentials of media and technology in the 21st century, to address notions of design, science, business, sex, gender, death, politics, environmentalism, globalization, neoliberalism, and the future. Works range from critical software, art-science fusions, social practice, experimental video, wearable architecture, performance, and more. In Material Evidence (2010, pictured to the left), artist Claudia Salamanca appropriates documentation made by the Colombian Government’s Technical Investigation Team during the identification process of a severed hand.
http://www.s-p-e-c-u-l-a-t-i-v-e.info
THE PUBLIC SCHOOL is a school with no curriculum. At the moment, it operates as follows: first, classes are proposed by the public (I want to learn this or I want to teach this); then, people have the opportunity to sign up for the classes (I also want to learn that); finally, when enough people have expressed interest, the school finds a teacher and offers the class to those who signed up.
THE PUBLIC SCHOOL is not accredited, it does not give out degrees, and it has no affiliation with the public school system. It is a framework that supports autodidactic activities, operating under the assumption that everything is in everything.
http://durham.thepublicschool.org
This is an archive of previous works that investigate processes of technological mediation and abstraction on human bodies. In The Hole(s) of Non-Teleology (pictured on the left), an interactive video installation compares video feedback to anal fisting.
