This discussion features artists Paloma Villegas, Isidro Zepeda, and Gustavo Rincón, along with UCR ARTS curator April N Baca and curator Liliana Conlisk Gallegos. Artists will delve into their work as collaborators, instructors, and community leaders on the “Monuments to the Pluriverse” exhibition, part of the groundbreaking UCR ARTS “Digital Capture: Southern California and the Origins of the Pixel-Based Image World” exhibition, which is a key component of the Getty Pacific Standard Time: Art x Science x Technology initiative.
Each artist’s work contributes to the rich tapestry of the pluriverse by exploring issues that affect minoritized communities while challenging traditional narratives and celebrating diverse perspectives. They will discuss the integration of artisanal rasquache techniques in VR and how this technology has served as a method to produce and share lesser-known quotidian heroic acts in coloniality.
Baca (Co-Curator, “Digital Capture”) and Conlisk Gallegos (Curator, “Monuments”) will provide insights into the curatorial process, emphasizing the dialogue between concurrent programming and their role in bridging art, science, and technology from a pluriversal lens. Additionally, they will outline upcoming events, publications, and community workshops designed to deepen public engagement and foster a broader understanding of transdisciplinary themes. Rincón (Exhibition coordinator, “Monuments”) will share on the process of VR production pedagogical curriculum in development.
This discussion will be a thought-provoking exploration of contemporary digital art practices, underscoring the importance of community, inclusivity, and diversity in the digital age. All activities are part of DAC Arts Community Engagement Programming led by Conlisk Gallegos and Rincón.
With the goal of advancing the certain decolonial turn, Dr. Machete’s (Liliana Conlisk Gallegos) live, interactive media art production and border rasquache performances generate culturally specific, collective, technocultural creative spaces of production that reconnect Chicana/o/x Mestiza Indigenous wisdom/conocimiento to their ongoing technological and scientific contributions, still currently “overlooked” through the logic of the decaying Eurocentric project of Modernity. As a transfronteriza (perpetual border crosser), to her, the current limited perceptions of what research, media, and technology can be are like a yonke (junkyard), from which pieces are upcycled and repurposed to amplify individual and collective expression, community healing, and social justice. She has organized and curated 14 community-centered, interactive, decolonial, community building, and environmentalist, research-based multimedia artivism and critical intervention performances part of series such as, Technocultura & Resistencia: Otro Mundo es Posible (2018-2019), Our San Bernardino, Nuestro (2018), and The Art of Dreaming: The Power of Turning Trash into Art (2017-2018) exhibited in museums, universities and colleges in the Inland Empire like The Garcia Center for the Arts, California State San Bernardino, San Bernardino Valley College, and the Creating Thirst Academy of Moreno Valley. Liliana Conlisk Gallegos is Associate Professor of Decolonial Media and Communication Studies at California State University San Bernardino. She is a member of the ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Arts Committee. She has digital art pieces that have been exhibited at SIGGRAPH, The García Center for the Arts in San Bernardino, Human Resources art museum in Los Angeles, the PAMLA Arts Matter of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association, and the Guizhou Provincial Museum in China.