“Learning from Las Vegas”: Border Aesthetics, Disturbance, and Electronic Disobedience. An Interview with Performance Artist Ricardo Dominguez
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since the 1980s the performance artist Ricardo Dominguez has been involved in collaborative art projects experimenting with political aesthetics. Critical Art Ensemble, formed in1987, explored intersections between art, technology, political activism as well as criticaltheory. In the 1990s, the Zapatista uprising and its insurgent use of communication technology inspired Dominguez to rethink his notion of art and art’s role in society. In 1997Dominguez was co-founder of The Electronic Disturbance Theater. About a decade later,in 2008, the group initiated the installation and performance pieceTransborder ImmigrantTool(TBT). The Electronic Disturbance Theater planned to distribute inexpensive mobilephones among individuals South of the US–Mexico border who planned to cross North.The group had developed a phone app that provided experimental poetry to unauthorizedmigrants while using GPS technology to lead them to water stations in the deserts of theborderlands. As an installation (water stations) and a performance (distribution, poetry,crossing of the border), theTransborder Immigrant Toolcalls attention to the processof crossing the border and the dangers involved. After all, each year about 250 deathsof migrants are registered in the borderlands, most of them caused by dehydration.1TBT’s art intervention confronts the public with the borderlands as a place of violenceand death. At the same time, it reflects on art’s potential of going beyond its own complicity in power structures. TBT also links art and politics to the technological and digitalizedculture of surveillance.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".