Elle Mehrmand is a new media performance artist and musician. Mehrmand's work combines the body and electronics. Her performance art work has been presented at museums, galleries and art festivals throughout the Americas. She is a member of the band Assembly of Mazes.
She is the singer and trombone player of Assembly of Mazes, a music collective who create dark, electronic, middle eastern, and rhythmic jazz rock. Elle received her MFA from UCSD, and received her BFA in art photography with a minor in music at CSULB. She is a researcher at the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts [1] and the b.a.n.g. lab [2] at UCSD.
Mehrmand's latest performances explore holographic technology. At the University Art Gallery's "Archive Fever" series, Mehrmand performed "Robert Breitmore will bring a Hologram" using a transparent screen from Reintek. [3]
In November 2010, Mehrmand performed Becoming Transreal [4] with Micha Cárdenas at the UCLA Freud Playhouse. [5] The performance demonstrates the interest in her work across disciplines, as it was supported by the UCLA Department of Theater, School of Theater, Film, and television, LGBT Studies, the Center for the Study of Women, The Center for Research in Engineering, Media and Performance, and the Center for Research in Computing the Arts at UCSD and San Diego State University's Second Life Initiative, Aztlan Island. The performance was reviewed by Linzi Juliano for the Center for the Study of Women. [6]
In January 2010, Mehrmand performed technésexual with Micha Cárdenas at Duke University's Visualization Technology Group's Interactive Studio. [7] The performance was supported by Duke's Women Studies Department, Information Science + Information Studies, Art, Art history and Visual Studies and the Franklin Humanities Institute. The performance was followed up by an artist lecture at the Nasher Museum. [8] Mehrmand's writing about technésexual has also been included in the peer reviewed journal Version. [9]
Mehrmand's work has been shown in numerous museums and galleries in 2010, including the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, the Galeria de la Raza in San Francisco [10] and the Perform! Now! festival in Chinatown, Los Angeles., [11] [12] [13] [14] Exhibitions in 2009 included "Intimate Simulations" at Lui Velazquez in Tijuana, among others.
Performances and talks in 2009 include technésexual at Arse Elektronika 2009 in San Francisco, [15] at Artivistic 2009 in Montreal [16] and at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics in Bogota, Colombia, [17] Slapshock at Compactspace in Los Angeles [18] Dorkbot Socal, [19] Sextrument at Upgrade! Tijuana, [20] Something is Happening [21] and UCSD Open Studios. [22]
Assembly of Mazes has performed recently at the Long Beach Museum of Art, [23] Gallery Azul, the Prospector and the Pasadena Gallery.
Mehrmand is a member of the Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0 and the b.a.n.g. lab, whose project the Transborder Immigrant Tool received extensive media coverage in 2010 around the world in on the web [24] print, [25] television [26] and radio. [27] The project has also been the subject of numerous academic papers, including "Reading the Transborder Immigrant Tool" at MLA 2011 [28] and "The Transborder Immigrant Tool: Violence, Solidarity and Hope in Post-NAFTA Circuits of the Body Elec(tron)ic" at Mobile HCI 2010. [29]
Her performance art work has been reviewed in Art:21, [17] The Los Angeles Times, [30] Reno News & Review, [31] Synthtopia, [32] The UCLA Center for the Study of Women, and Furtherfield.org. [33]
The band Assembly of Mazes' music has been reviewed in the OC Weekly, [34] Artslant [35] and Strung Out Zine [36]
Mehrmand's erotic mixed reality work has been awarded the Emerging Fields Award from the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts.[ citation needed ]
Locative media or location-based media (LBM) is a virtual medium of communication functionally bound to a location. The physical implementation of locative media, however, is not bound to the same location to which the content refers.
Hannah Wilke was an American painter, sculptor, photographer, video artist and performance artist. Wilke's work is known for exploring issues of feminism, sexuality and femininity.
Eiko Otake and Takashi Koma Otake, generally known as Eiko & Koma, are a Japanese performance duo. Since 1972, Eiko & Koma have worked as co-artistic directors, choreographers, and performers, creating a unique theater of movement out of stillness, shape, light, sound, and time. For most of their multi-disciplinary works, Eiko & Koma also create their own sets and costumes, and they are usually the sole performers in their work. Neither of them studied traditional Japanese dance or theater forms and prefer to choreograph and perform only their own works. They do not bill their work as Butoh though Eiko & Koma cite Kazuo Ohno as their main inspiration.
Torolab is an artist collective, workshop and laboratory of contextual studies that identifies situations or phenomena of interest for research, basing the studies in the realm of life styles to better grasp the idea of quality of life. Founded in Tijuana in 1995 by Raúl Cárdenas Osuna.
Barbara Turner Smith is an American artist known for her performance art in the late 1960s, exploring themes of food, nurturing, the body, spirituality, and sexuality. Smith was part of the Feminist Movement in Southern California in the 1970s, and has collaborated in her work with scientists and other artists. Her work has been widely exhibited and collected by major museums including the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Hammer Museum, MOCA, LACMA, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
The California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2, previously Cal(IT)2), also referred to as the Qualcomm Institute (QI) at its San Diego branch, is a $400 million academic research institution jointly run by the University of California San Diego (UCSD) and the University of California, Irvine (UCI); in January 2022, plans were announced to add University of California, Riverside to the consortium. Calit2 was established in 2000 as one of the four UC Gray Davis Institutes for Science and Innovation. As a multidisciplinary research institution, it is conducting research discovering new ways in which emerging technologies can improve the state's economy and citizens' quality of life. Keeping in mind its goal of addressing large-scale societal issues, Calit2 extends beyond education and research by also focusing on the development and deployment of prototype infrastructure for testing new solutions in real world environments. Calit2 also provides an academic research environment in which students can work alongside industry professionals to take part in conducting research and prototyping and testing new technologies.
Micha Cárdenas, stylized as micha cárdenas, is an American visual and performance artist who is an assistant professor of art and design, specializing in game studies and playable media, at the University of California Santa Cruz. Cárdenas is an artist and theorist who works with the algorithms and poetics of trans people of color in digital media.
The Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT), established in 1997 by performance artist and writer Ricardo Dominguez, is an electronic company of cyber activists, critical theorists, and performance artists who engage in the development of both the theory and practice of non-violent acts of defiance across and between digital and non-digital spaces.
Arts in Second Life is an artistic area of a 3D social network that has served, since 2003, as a platform for various artistic pursuits and exhibitions.
The Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny (CARTA) is an Organized Research Unit (ORU) at the University of California, San Diego. Formally established in 2008, CARTA is a collaboration between faculty members of UCSD main campus, the UCSD School of Medicine, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, and interested scientists at other institutions from around the world.
The Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA) was an interdisciplinary organized research unit of UCSD in San Diego, California. CRCA provided support for numerous projects that intersect with the fields of New Media Art, Software Studies, Game studies, Art/Science collaborations, Mixed Reality, Experimental Music, Digital Audio, Immersive Art and Networked Performance over its 40 year history. CRCA was originally founded by composer Roger Reynolds as the Center for Music Experiment (CME) in 1972, and was directed for many years by F. Richard Moore. The center was renamed and the scope widened when artist and artificial intelligence pioneer Harold Cohen became Director in 1993.
Arse Elektronika is an annual conference organized by the Austrian arts and philosophy collective monochrom, focused on sex and technology. The festival presents talks, workshops, machines, presentations and films. The festival's curator is Johannes Grenzfurthner. Between 2007 and 2015, the event was held in San Francisco, but is now a traveling event in different countries.
Ricardo Dominguez is an American artist and associate professor of visual arts at UC San Diego. He has been the subject of controversy over a number of acts of electronic civil disobedience on his own and with the Electronic Disturbance Theater, which he co-founded.
Sheldon Brown is an American artist and former Professor of Computer Art at the University of California, San Diego where he held the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Endowed Chair of Digital Media and Learning. He was the founding director of the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination at UCSD, a co-founder of the California Institute of Information Technologies and Telecommunications, where he was Artist-in-Residence, and he was the site director of the Center for Hybrid Multicore Productivity Research at UCSD. He has been a Visiting Arts Professor at NYU Shanghai, an Honorary Professor at Shanghai University and Professor and Research Leader at the Creative Computing Institute, University of the Arts London. His work examines the relationships between mediated and physical experiences.
Miguel-Ángel Cárdenas, also known as Michel Cardena, was a Colombian-Dutch, New Realism and Pop Art painter and a pioneer of video art in the Netherlands. His works cover a variety of artistic media, including painting, drawing, video, photography, object assemblages and digital art.
A transreality game, sometimes written as trans-reality game, describes a type of video game or a mode of gameplay that combines playing a game in a virtual environment with game-related, physical experiences in the real world and vice versa. In this approach a player evolves and moves seamlessly through various physical and virtual stages, brought together in one unified game space. Alongside the rising trend of gamification, the application of game mechanics to tasks that are not traditionally associated with play, a transreality approach to gaming incorporates mechanics that extend over time and space, effectively playing through a players day-to-day interactions.
Rafael Esparza is an American performance artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. His work includes performances that present a toll on his physical well being and installations constructed out of adobe bricks. Esparza often works with collaborators, including members of his family.
Sonia Baez-Hernandez is a Puerto-Dominican interdisciplinary artist. She works with a wider variety of media including drawing, painting, instillations, performance art, poetry, and filmmaking. Baez-Hernandez is also a human rights activist, particularly in regard to victims of the American healthcare system.
Dan Allon is an Israeli interdisciplinary artist. He works mostly in the fields of visual art and graphic novels. He exhibited solo shows in museums and galleries, such as Cartoonmuseum Basel, and regularly participates in group shows, book fairs and performance events. Allon also curated exhibitions. In the majority of his artworks, Allon investigates the connection between a biography to subjects such as humor, artistic action and power. He usually does so using his own life-story as means.