Jasper’s Wardrobe

I have been iterating on this public gender for about a month, during my transition into my new home in West Oakland. It is kind of a Unisex Femme. Paradoxically, the clothing was designed and manufactured to fulfill Female genderbending from the 1960's onward. This is an Androgyny for females only. Where it once was transgressive, it is now thoroughly reabsorbed into the Mass-Mediated fashion public.  These are "culturally femme" and anatomically unisex items of clothing.

When I first started violating sartorial customs through public genderbending, I was fashion illiterate. I had only the barest idea of the semiotics. I could not clearly separate the Artifice of Femme fashion technology from anatomical femaleness. I have written elsewhere about how significant it is that Hegemonic masculinity roles do not provide males with the tools to understand and deconstruct the semiotics of gender. It took a huge amount of trial and error to separate out Femme Magic from the effect of estrogen on Female anatomy. Many new male genderbenders focus on anatomically female fashion, on female impersonation. They focus on Female rather than Femme. They take June Cleaver as their model rather than David Bowie. I think that is partly due their lack of access to the "trade secrets" of the Femme Communities of Practice.  

For example, I have learned how to create "spellbinding eyes" through the use of eyeliner and color. Before I had the experience of casting this particular spell, I always associated it with a vague Femaleness. I biologized it and essentialized the Male/Female. I had no other mental model to hang it on. This restricted default male Point Of View cannot truly deconstruct gender.

What is the phrase? "A sufficiently advanced technology will be seen as magic." Male Point of View is doomed to see Femme and gender as Magic. Because the Default Male has no experience of organizing his own gender. Those who think fashion is a superficial subject do not even see the technologies of gender. Most likely they take project realness upon male fashion and feel that this is the model that Liberated Females should follow.

Ten (Un) Interesting Facts About My New Counterpublican Street Fair Map

• 2008-2010 I documented the material culture of San Francisco street fairs.
• These fairs are an eruption of parallel underground publics into "The Public".
• Each festival balloon is a document of the strangers who I have plucked out of the crowd.
• I get to know many of these humans, and bond with them before snapping my photo.
• I was exploring the thresholds of Gender Identity for these Counterpublics, and the parameters of Gendered Fashion.
• I have tagged my street fair photos with Semantic Machine Tags. This allows me to query my flickr photos like a database.
• The Map can be copied and re-used. See the Google Project Page. 
• The map uses Javascript, Html5, Google Appengine, Google Maps v3 and the Flickr API
• Flickr provides an online tool for crafting and testing Media Queries. Just cut and paste this into my flickr.js file. 
• The app runs on the iphone. The art piece will soon be peripatetic, it will take you and your smartphone to the sites of the photographs.

This piece is a major new Mashup for me.

• I read Semantically Tagged Photos from the Flickr website and shove them into  Bubbles on a Google Map of the San Francisco Bay Area.
• The Photos are of all of my Street Fashion Safari's during San Francisco Bay's Conterpublican Street Festivals. 
• Clicking a bubble replays my visual journey though these Conterpublican Spaces. 
• Many of these people describe themselves as Queer, Trans, Burner, Raver, Traveller, Crustpunk, Anarchist, Fag, Queen, Dyke, Dominant, Submissive, Fat Girl, (Queer)WomanOfColor, PersonOfColor, Butch, Femme, Transgender, Genderqueer or No-Label.
• These are images of "Really Existing" counterpublics, genders and bodies. As such, these images will never be broadcast by "The Public".
• My Magic Map is an Immutable Mobile which binds photos together into discrete GeoTemporal Events and sends them to your laptop or smartphone.

Gay Pride, Dyke March & Pink Saturday

This is version 1.1 of my Dancing Jasper Map. It is an example of the relatively unknown medium of Locative Data Art. I am using the Geo Spatial Search capabilities of Flickr and Programmable Google Maps to create a complex cartographic representation of my my deterritorializing line-of-flight through Queer Carnaval Space on the afternoon of June 26th 2010.

One of the themes of my recent work is how to publicize and broadcast ethnographic data from a counterpublic. These kinds of images usually propagate within the boundaries of one Counterpublic such as (mostly white) Lesbian and Gay Hipster, Mainstream Gay, Transgender, Transsexual, Queer People of Color, or the panopoly of straight counterpublics. Publicity tends to be intra-public rather than inter-public. The Social media tend to reinforce these dynamics as individuals act as distributed filters for what reaches the Interior of the Counterpublic.

When mobiles like Photos cross the membranes of the counterpublics they change meanings. To use Bruno Latour's language they are not faithful allies. Images do not transmit my intent, or the intent of the original "fashion statement" as they circulate.

A audiovisual data archive like Flickr undermines these membranes between publics to some extent. But my "immutable mobiles", my images are decontextualized on Flickr as individual photographs. They are absorbed into the FlickrSphere, and abstracted away from Ethnographic and Counterpublic Context. In a sense Flickr commodifies the photos within the framework of the Attention economy. They become an attention commodity. I get thousand of eyeballs a day, but these eyeballs are instantiated as consumers, rather than as members of my Art-Public.

This Temporal map is an iteration of my goal to create a different kind of Immutable Mobile. This is photographic data that refuses to be decontextualized. 

The javascript code for this piece is Open Sourced under the Creative Commons Non-Commercial license I created the psycho-geo Google Project to house the code for my Locative Data Art. . Please reuse and remix it. Drop me a line if you would like to get involved.

August 3, 2010 | Berkeley, CA | Boy Street Fashion & Street Art

This outfit is Jasper in High Boy. This is the masculine leg of my Gender Dialectic. This is the fashion retreat where I am in hiding. I learn a lot during these camouflaged periods. However by not giving publicity to my feminine gender, I pay a price. My connections with other women become more formal and distant. I stop performing homo-social contact with other women. A part of me withers, a part that is emotional and vulnerable, and thus begins the dialectic swing back towards Public Femininity.

I have started to think the word interiority as Habermas uses it, describes this "Place" within me that is developed in Girl Society and made Unrepresentable in Boy Society. The Masculine gender is inscribed through the magic trick of making male interiority disappear, this is related to the phenomenon of Male clothing hiding the body. In a very strange sense male are treated as abstract socio-linguistic entities in the Public Sphere, while female bodies and interiorities are both seen and talked about in Public.  I represent a new movement of Males who want to exist as fully developed human beings, but find the social constraints of The social Gender "Man" to be too constraining, so we identify publicly as Woman.

I feel that this is a continuation of the Enlightenment project and the struggle for Individual Liberty. I contend that our social practices of Institutional Education and a centralized mass-media Public Sphere reproduce the social practices of gender. The free, decentralize media ecosystem of Twitter publicity plus the giant cloud-based Audio-Visual-Textual Databases like Youtube, Flickr, and Wordpress, finally allows us to continue the enlightenment project of banishing superstitions like the rigid dichotomies of Sex, Gender and Sexuality. 

June 5th 2010 SfArts, DanceMachine! A Customer Service dance installation. at The White House | curated by Mirium Wolordarski #MAPPmission #SF

           

Click here to download:

Dance_Machine_A_Customer_Servi.zip (8280 KB)

Click here to download:

Voice_Recording.wav (638 KB)

Google Map Location
Accuracy is within 144 meters.

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