A ED 597

This week's reading reminded me of The Magdalena Project, which focuses on raising awareness about the visibility of women within the theatre and art worlds, as well as focusing on issues of power and representation of women in general. The former is usually addressed through performances, plays and discussion forums; the latter, through practical workshops and participatory theatre plays. https://www.themagdalenaproject.org/en (Chilean Version Promo Video - 2013) This is a promo video we did for the Mestiza Festival in 2013. We also did a longer piece in which we interviewed many of the artists and participants of the event, discovering an immense feeling of learning and empowerment from the workshops' participants, mainly local, working class women who were shown that theatre and performance could be used in order to bring the community together and, more importantly, to talk and share the community's concerns and feelings. In the same vein (yet in a different...

* Social Media sites as matter, which is able to possess agency. * Also, Social Media sites as places for the multimaterial to live in and intra-act with both the human users (and viewers) and among the sites themselves. This chapter reminded me of an old -very strange- anime series called Serial Experiments Lain, where the internet (called the Wired in the show) is an ever-changing space that at the same time changes the shape of its users constantly. The director, years before the rise of the web 2.0, installs the idea of the internet (and what seems to resemble social media) as a space with an agency of its own (it even materializes several times through the show), and which could even give birth to a human (or human-like) being, as we find out by the end of the show, when the protagonist decides to reset herself to be reborn. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=If1lblE5JLY (9:28 - 11:48 + 17:10 - 19:00)

The Story of Stuff. Bottled Water. http://storyofstuff.org/movies/story-of-bottled-water/ Bioplastics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bydzCfMQ944 https://www.dezeen.com/tag/bioplastic/

Mi collaboration will be inserted within the STEAM context, since I will be working with engineering graduate student Swapnil Sinha. We are both assistants in a NSF-funded research about makerspaces and the role of creativity in understanding the concepts behind additive manufacturing and 3D printing. Although the main project's aim is to tackle STEM skills through art, I found an exercise that I believe may have potential for other kinds of reflection, through STEM skills. In the spirit of blurring the lines between disciplines, forms of creating knowledge, and artistic practices, I found the exercise of creating collages out of different materials by using both digital 3D modeling tools and a 3D scanner device to be quite powerful, specially since the finished product is a mashup with no borders between the different sources and materials, with the identities and ideas that each of them may bring along. Here's a draft of how the process works with an example I prepared...