Ricardo Dominguez

Professor

(858) 534-6107

Office/Studio
CALIT2/Atkinson Hall Room 2501

Biography

Ricardo Dominguez was a founding member of Critical Art Ensemble (http://critical-art.net/) and a cofounder of Electronic Disturbance Theater 1.0 (EDT), a group who developed virtual sit-in technologies in solidarity with the Zapatistas communities in Chiapas, Mexico, in 1998 (https://anthology.rhizome.org/floodnet). His recent Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab project with Brett Stalbaum, Micha Cardenas, Amy Sara Carroll, and Elle Mehrmand, the Transborder Immigrant Tool - https://tbt.tome.press/ - (a GPS cell phone safety net tool for crossing the Mexico/US border) was the winner of “Transnational Communities Award” (2008), an award funded by Cultural Contact, Endowment for Culture Mexico–US and handed out by the US Embassy in Mexico. It also was funded by CALIT2 and the UCSD Center for the Humanities. The Transborder Immigrant Tool has been exhibited at the 2010 California Biennial (OCMA), Toronto Free Gallery, Canada (2011), The Van Abbemuseum, Netherlands (2013), ZKM, Germany (2013), and more recently, Art in the Age of Anxiety, Sharjah Art Foundation (SAF) UA (2020), Under a Different Sky, Blideside Gallery, Australia (2021), Intergalactix: against isolation/contra el aislamiento, LACE, CA (2021), as well as several other national and international venues. The Transborder Immigrant Tool was also under investigation by the US Congress, the FBI, Homeland Security, UCSD and UCOP in 2009-2010 and was reviewed by Glenn Beck in 2010 as a gesture that potentially “dissolved” the U.S. border with its poetry. Dominguez is an associate professor at the University of California, San Diego, in the Visual Arts Department, a Hellman Fellow, and Principal/Principle Investigator at CALIT2/Qi, UCSD. He also is co-founder of *particle group*, with artists Diane Ludin, Nina Waisman, Amy Sara Carroll, whose art project about nano-toxicology entitled *Particles of Interest: Tales of the Matter Market* has been presented at the House of World Cultures, Berlin (2007), the San Diego Museum of Art (2008), Oi Futuro, Brazil (2008), CAL NanoSystems Institute, UCLA (2009), Medialab-Prado, Madrid (2009), E-Poetry Festival, Barcelona, Spain (2009), Nanosférica, NYU (2010), and SOMA, Mexico City, Mexico (2012). He was a Society for the Humanities Fellow at Cornell University (2017-18), a Rockefeller Fellow (Bellagio Center, Italy) during the summer of (2018), and a UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy Fellow (2021). He took part in a video series entitled An Oral History of the Internet, for the NYUAD Art Gallery, (https://www.nyuad-artgallery.org/en_US/resources/watch/an-oral-history-of-the-internet/), (2021). Ricardo is also chair of the Department of the Visual Arts. Many of his articles and essays can be found at: https://ucsd.academia.edu/RicardoDominguez