PERFORMANCE

Body Animations (or, Lullaby for Fallujah)

A 45-minute performance lecture that explores public (un)memory, digital perception, and the politics of trauma through a juxtaposition of Body Worlds, the popular exhibition of plastinated human corpses, and the U.S. siege of Fallujah, Iraq. Accompanied by visual and sound collage created in collaboration with digital artist Dovar Chen.

INVITED PERFORMANCES:
University of California, Davis. Sponsored by the Consortium for Women and Research. Davis, CA, March 31, 2011.

York University. Sponsored by School of Women’s Studies, International Development Studies, Centre for Refugee Studies, and the Department of Sociology. Toronto, Canada, January 26, 2011.

The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Sponsored by the Sociology Department and the Center for the Study of Women and Society. New York, NY, December 9, 2010.

Arizona State University. Symposium on “New Approaches to Trauma: Bridging Theory and Practice.” Organized by the New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences. Phoenix, AZ, October 8, 2010.

Vanderbilt University. Symposium on “Trauma: Memory, the Body, and the Arts.” Organized by Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities. Nashville, TN, March 19, 2010.

In the Plague Years: The PSYCHOpolitics of Bioterrorism

A 45-minute performance piece conjuring the geo-bio-psycho-political landscapes of contemporary U.S. “security” culture. The piece explores the phantasmatic il/logics of pre-emption and public secrets embedded in the Department of Homeland Security’s program of simulated bioterrorist attacks, and the anthrax attacks of September 2001. Accompanied by digital sound collage.

Listen to the performance:
MP 3

INVITED PERFORMANCES:
Burchfield Penney Art Gallery, Buffalo State College. Symposium on “Ethnographic Dreamworlds.” Sponsored by Soft Arcades Productions and the Department of Sociology. Buffalo, NY, April 23, 2010.

Keynote address, New York State Sociological Association (NYSSA). Rochester, NY, October 16, 2009.

16 Beaver Arts Collective. Symposium on “Connective Mutations: Autonomy & Subjectivation.” Organized by the Autonomedia Collective and Minor Compositions. New York, NY, September 3-6, 2009.

Whitworth Gallery, University of Manchester. Symposium on “Animation and Automation.” Organized by the Research Institute for Cosmopolitan Cultures. Manchester, England, March 26, 2009.

Duke University. Symposium on “Scenes of Secrecy: Interdisciplinary Inquiries on Suspicion, Intelligence, and Security.” Organized by the Department of Cultural Anthropology and the Human Rights Center. Durham, NC, October 17, 2008.

Daddy Does Cybernetics: Diary of a Mental Patient

This 55-minute multimedia performance piece situates panic within Cold War U.S. cultures and new cybernetic forms of social control. Part political theater, part social history, part cultural poetics, the piece narrates the mobilization of panic through nuclear (and nuclear family) terrors, and the psychotic politics of a nascent national security state.

INVITED PERFORMANCES:
Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Sponsored by the Fisher Center Lecture Series, Geneva, NY, October 3, 2007.

University of California, Davis. Sponsored by Science and Technology Studies, February 22, 2007.

University of Toronto. “Biopolitics + Technoscience” speakers series, co-sponsored by the Women and Gender Studies Institute and the Centre for the Study of the U.S., February 9, 2007.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Sponsored by the Departments of Art, and Science and Technology Studies, Troy, NY, September 13, 2006.

University of Lancaster, England. Symposium on “Gender, Technology, and Performativity.” Co-sponsored by the Institute for Women’s Studies and the Centre for Science Studies, June 12, 2005.

University of California, Berkeley. Sponsored by the Joint Program in Medical Anthropology, April 8, 2004.

University of Chicago, conference on Depression: What Is It Good For? Sponsored by the Society of Fellows/Critical Inquiry, March 12, 2004.

University of Maryland, College Park. Sponsored by the Sociology Department, February 9, 2004.

New York University. Sponsored by the Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality, Sociology Department, and Performance Studies Department, March 11, 2003.