Events
We are excited to announce the Spring 2024 Logic(s) Speakers Series—a ten part series of virtual public events reflecting relevant transnational tech conversations from people and communities doing deeply important work but too often subjected to institutional marginalization. Running every Wednesday from April 3rd to June 5th, this series will center transnational voices and perspectives essential to thinking critically about technology. Featuring organizers, poets, artists, and scholars from Sudan, Palestine, Kashmir and more, this series will reflect the varied frequencies of Logic(s) vision, helping us make critical tech conversations more accessible and develop a shared lexicon for the future we seek to create.
Upcoming Speakers Series Talks:
HOB Cribs: Bones Jones on Black Queer+Trans Fashion Futures
Wed, Apr 17 • 12:00 PM EDT
Bones Jones, our inaugural Logic(s) Fashion Designer in Residence, will discuss Black Queer + Trans fashion futures from a critical tech lens, exploring fashion as a form of technology, Black Queer and Trans aesthetics, and the sociopolitical frameworks that shape the fashion world. Bones will discuss the past, present, and future of his artistic evolution. He’ll describe what he saw for himself as an artist from the beginning, and where he sees the future for both himself and the House of Bones brand. Bones will discuss how the brand communicates his wants and needs to the community, and how his work influences culture at large.
Bones Jones grew up in Virginia but always knew there was more to life than his small hometown. His fondness for fashion began as a child watching his grandmother sew for her downtown boutique, which specialized in church hats and formal wear. After receiving his first sewing machine from her at age 16, he attended the Virginia School of the Arts to study ballet, jazz, and modern dance. Bones’s love for the arts led him to be a background dancer for various icons—Beyoncé, Mariah Carey, Jennifer Lopez, and many others. He made his Broadway debut as an original cast member of The Illusionists and also appeared in Off-Broadway’s Fuerza Bruta. After four years of living abroad and in Los Angeles, Bones retired from professional dance and moved back to New York in 2019 to focus on launching his line, House O Bones (HOB). With an interest in unisex fashion and everything lifestyle, HOB has something for everyone.
Blue Lips to Blue Breaths: Weaving and Inking from Bengal to Kashmir
Wed, Apr 24 • 12:00 PM EDT
What are the modalities of caste and colonial mappings onto the bodies of shivering Kashmiri Muslim weavers who weave “cashmere,” even as Brahminical colonizers starve, strangle, censor Kashmir/Cashmere? The British empire infamously amputated the thumbs of weavers of Dhaka Muslin to reduce competition to their industrially produced textiles in Manchester. The Kashmiri weavers, on the other hand, were forbidden by the Dogra colonizers from leaving their looms, and sometimes resorted to cutting off their own fingers to escape enforced starvation. What are the sexual politics of the “bullet and pellet” makeup effect for the postcolonial Indian runway models, draped in cashmere, depicting “Kashmiriyat” or Kashmiriness? How do we theorize blue blood, blue lungs, blue fingers, the blue stuck underneath the nails, the blue breath that stretched Black and brown bodies across the four continents while holding onto caste relationalities? In this conversation we will examine Indigo as the site for both, consolidating and the unmaking of hierarchies of caste and coloniality while focusing on the British occupied Brahminical Subcontinent and juxtapose that to an interrogation of cashmere as a colonized “resource” in Occupied Kashmir. From Bengal to Kashmir, the politics and aesthetics of textile technologies, maiming, and dis/coloring, as they fashion olfactible, thermal subjectivities of both colonized and colonizer.
Huma Dar’s paternal family was ethnically-cleansed from Srinagar, Kashmir in 1948 for demanding plebiscites under the UN Resolutions. Her maternal family, exiled from Kashmir after accepting Islam during the Dogra regime, fought for Independence from the British. With an interdisciplinary background, Dar has lectured in the departments of Gender & Women’s Studies, Ethnic Studies, and South Asian Studies at University of California at Berkeley and in the Department of Critical Studies and Philosophy at California College of the Arts.
Shaista Aziz Patel works as an Assistant Professor of Critical Muslim Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UCSD. Her scholarly and all other political investments are in several questions that draw upon theories in Indigenous (to North America and South Asia), Black, Dalit, anti-caste, Muslim, and transnational feminist studies.
Symbiotic Connectivity - Cultivating Tech Ecologies
Wed, May 1 • 12:00 PM EDT
“This piece is about what it looks like to cultivate rural tech ecologies. It brings an ongoing example of crafting symbiotic infrastructures in a communitarian way. It’s about ecology, technology, the sun, the land and the contradictions in between.”
Part artist talk and part tech workshop/demo, Yadira Sanchez will introduce us to her work and describe how she creates technologies exploring indigenous rural methodologies around community, collaboration, mutuality with the ecologies around us.
Yadira Sanchez is cultivating tech ecologies. They are using software, hardware and data to bring together ecological systems and tech making as a way to co-create and deepen connections with our ecologies. Parting from her rural upbringing, Yadira is invested in, inspired and informed by the traditional ecological knowledge of her rural community and surrounding ecologies, where she will continue to cultivate tech ecologies.
On the Black US South
Wed, May 8 • 12:00 PM EDT
The Southern Movement Assembly’s Guled Abdirashid will be in conversation with Logic(s) fellows Jasmine Lewis and Ra’il I’Nasah Kiam, discussing secure movement communication and organizing across the US South and the development of a framework around Black Southern Critical Tech Futures.
Guled Abdirashid is a cultural worker and movement technologist from Clarkston, Georgia. Grounded in the works of Ella Baker and the Black Radical Traditional, he has spent more than a decade building and securing movement infrastructure locally and regionally through various formations including the Southern Movement Assembly.
Ra’il I’Nasah Kiam is a writer, artist, digital curator, and independent scholar and researcher. Their work focuses on Black politics and cultural production, the American South, and online misinformation/disinformation.
Jasmine Lewis (she/her) is a multi-intentional artist, scholar, and vanguard of social change who approaches her aspirations in the same way that she perceives the world—kaleidoscopically. In addition to founding the global storytelling collective TALMBAT, since 2019 Jasmine has served various communities through her work in movement-building and advocacy to craft a more equitable and inclusive society. Her mission is to live life authentically and impactfully, beaming a light of possibility to illuminate ways for future generations to blaze their own paths toward liberation.
Indigenous Technologies and Infrastructures of Liberation in Hawaiʻi
Wed, May 15 • 12:00 PM EDT
With the threat of the Thirty Meter Telescope’s desecration and destruction of Mauna Kea in Hawaiʻi lingering still, Kanaka Maoli theorists, practitioners, and organizers are building alternative technologies and infrastructures for Indigenous liberation against occupation, settler colonialism, and conquest in the islands. This conversation brings together luminaries in the movement to discuss their sovereign freedom dreams in Hawaiʻi for deoccupation, decolonization, and liberation.
Uahikea Maile is a Kanaka Maoli scholar, activist, and practitioner from Maunawili, Oʻahu. He is an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Politics in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto, St. George. He’s also the founding Director of Ziibiing Lab, and an Affiliate Faculty in the Centre for Indigenous Studies and Centre for the Study of the United States. Maile’s research interests include: history, law, and activism on Hawaiian sovereignty; Indigenous critical theory; settler colonialism; political economy; feminist and queer theories; and decolonization.
Say My Names: Quartz
Wed, May 22 • 12:00 PM EDT
Throughout this talk/workshop, Treva Ellison will engage quartz, a mineral that is found in almost every electronic device that we use, through an Afro-Indigenous, ritual performance framework. Treva will share a story about quartz and invite the audience into some collective creation. Everyone will have an opportunity to learn the names of the quartz in your nearest and dearest devices.
Treva Ellison (they / them) is a Black queer scholar, and artist. Treva’s practice is informed by their ancestors, the elements, tectonic time, and being held in a beloved community. The work they do is grounded in their experience and training in Black queer feminism, abolition, and Afro-Indigenous traditional knowledge. Their current project, S7A, is an experiment in rest and respite as portals into practicing collective care, incubating marronage, and remembering Afro-Indigenous land ways.
On the technologies of Black/Afro-Indigenous Poetics
Wed, May 29 • 12:00 PM EDT
Throughout this conversation, SA Smythe and Alan Pelaez Lopez discuss how the black/afro-indigenous trans imagination counters imperial/border technologies and poetry as a technology of liberation (material and otherwise). The speakers are excited to shake their fists about metaphors and counterinsurgency.
SA Smythe is a multi-instrumentalist, critical theorist, and transmedia storyteller and educator conjuring cartographies of black belonging. Their practice choreographs sound compositions, light sculptures, poetics, performance, and archival ephemera. Smythe has work featured in collaborative and solo performance exhibitions, film and multimedia installations, poetry anthologies, and in literary and performance festivals. Learn more about their work at https://essaysmythe.com/
Alan Pelaez Lopez is an afroindigenous (Zapotec) poet, installation, and adornment artist from Oaxaca, México. Their work attends to the quotidian realities of undocumented migrants in the United States, Black resistance in the Pacific, and the intimate kinship units that trans* and nonbinary people build in the face of violence. Their debut visual poetry collection, Intergalactic Travels: poems from a fugitive alien (The Operating System, 2020), was a finalist for the 2020 International Latino Book Award. Learn more about their work at http://www.alanpelaez.com/.
Video Archive
The Walls Have Eyes: Border Tech with the Migration and Technology Monitor
Wed, Apr 10 • 12:00 PM EDT
On Sudan: the affordances of social media in a time of war:
Wed, April 3 • 12:00 PM EDT