social folds, technological folds, species folds

Hi,



I'm a bit embarrassed that I hadn't noticed all the activity on the blog, so I'll try to catch up! I'm lotu5 and I live in the San Diego / Tijuana borderlands. I'm so excited about meeting you all and working with you after reading all the fascinating descriptions of your work and practices. I also know and have worked a bit with Alessandra.



I'm presently finishing my master's thesis at the European Graduate School about the role of desire in politics, or more specifically, exploring the Deleuzian productive desire as a basis for a queer biopolitics, looking at how a transgender reconfiguring of desire can shape or inform world-building projects and resistance to control of the body.



I'm also working on my MFA at University of California, San Diego focusing on performance studies and social media. My work to date has focused on collective perfomance projects engaging with social media in various ways, starting with the Boredom Patrol of the Rebel Clown Army and developing a practice of the clown that is very focused on the body, but then taking those collective actions into the online public space of Youtube.



More recently, I've been focused on Sharing is Sexy.org, an open source porn laboratory, exploring the way that open source methodologies can be applied to cultural production and specifically to queer porn production. I'm very excited that there are a few of us who will be in the workshop who've been really working on this question of the erotic, as it pertains to movement and folding of subjectivities, but also specifically developing erotic somatic practice beyond the limits of male and female and in a collective context. I am very interested in the idea of social action as research, in the way that politics, art and science come together in a productive difference that is interdisciplinary practice.



For my thesis project at UCSD, I'm continuing my trajectory of the question of how
technology can facilitate new practices of identity, sexuality and resistance, by using motion capture and immersive technology to bring a bodily presence into Second Life and exploring the integration of the physical and virtual body.



I'll just make a quick note on some of the reading. I found the Spinoza Practical Philosophy essay to be very rich in connections to what I've been thinking about. Clearly, the discussion of affective capacities and intensive thresholds has a lot of resonance for the erotic work I've been doing, as in this quote which speaks to the experimental richness that work has for me, "you do not know before­ hand what a body or a mind can do, in a given encounter, a given arrangement, a given combination," but I also appreciate the shifts in scale that Deleuze makes in this essay, not just thinking about individual bodies, but going on saying "it is no longer a matter of utilizations or captures, but of sociabilities and communities . How do individuals enter into composition with one another in order to form a higher individual, ad infini­tum?". I've been teaching a class on Collective Practice and we discussed Delanda's A New Philosophy of Society just last week, so this method of shifting scales and looking for the links between them stood out to me, as Delanda focuses on it. As well, I've been reading Haraway's When Species Meet, so the discussion of animal bodies also stood out, in terms of the questions she raises about how an encounter with something so other can reconfigure questions of ethics and world-building. "Now we are concerned, not with a relation of point to counter point, nor with the selection of a world, but with a symphony of Nature, the composition of a world that is increasingly wide and intense."