Ricardo Dominguez (born 1959) is an American artist, professor and chair of the visual arts department at

UC San Diego The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego in communications material, formerly and colloquially UCSD) is a public land-grant research university in San Diego, California, United States. Established in 1960 near the pre-existing Sc ...

. He has been the subject of controversy over a number of acts of electronic civil disobedience on his own and with the

Electronic Disturbance Theater The Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT), established in 1997 by performance artist and writer Ricardo Dominguez, is an electronic company of cyber activists, critical theorists, and performance artists. History The Electronic Disturbance Theat ...

, which he co-founded. Dominguez, the founder of the

, has organized "virtual sit-ins" that attempted to overload and crash websites, for which he and his co-founder developed a program called FloodNet that automatically requests the target page over and over. These events sometimes incorporated a search term, such that the search would return a phrase like "Transparency not found" in the

University of California, San Diego The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego in communications material, formerly and colloquially UCSD) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in San Diego, California, United States. Es ...

website, or "human rights not found" at the website of Mexican President

Ernesto Zedillo Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León (; born 27 December 1951) is a Mexican economist and politician. He was the 61st president of Mexico from 1994 to 2000, as the last of the uninterrupted 71-year line of Mexican presidents from the Institutional Re ...

. On one occasion, the

United States Department of Defense The United States Department of Defense (DoD, USDOD, or DOD) is an United States federal executive departments, executive department of the federal government of the United States, U.S. federal government charged with coordinating and superv ...

diverted a planned attack to a nonexistent website. One goal of the movement is solidarity with Zapatista communities in Chiapas, Mexico. He was part of media freedom protests against suppression of communal media (primarily radio) and was featured in the

Wired magazine ''Wired'' is a bi-monthly American magazine that focuses on how emerging technologies affect culture, the economy, and politics. It is published in both print and Online magazine, online editions by Condé Nast. The magazine has been in public ...

on the related topics. Dominguez also helped develop a phone app called the Transborder Immigrant Tool (TBT), which would use GPS technology to help immigrants find water stations in the Southern California desert and which also includes a poetry feature. It also raises awareness about the number of people who die in the U.S.-Mexico border region and aims to rethink the ways in which "immigrants are always presented as less-than-human and certainly not part of a community which is establishing and inventing new forms of life."Global Positioning: An Interview with Ricardo Dominguez http://www.furtherfield.org/features/global-positioning-interview-ricardo-dominguez TBT was subject to considerable controversy initiated by three Republican California congressmen; ultimately the University of California stated that TBT did not misuse research funds, but would not comment on whether it had broken any laws. In an interview, Dominguez reports that his work, along with that of the Electronic Disturbance Theater, "has been to develop works that can create a performative matrix that activate and take a measure of the current conditions and intensities of power/s, communities and their anxieties or resistances." He was also co-director of Thing (thing.net) an ISP for artists and activists that started as an art project of Wolgang Staehle. He was a Hellman Fellow, and principal investigator at CALIT2. He was also co-founder of *particle group* with artists Diane Ludin, Nina Waisman, Amy Sara Carroll reflecting on nanotechnology in work *Particles of Interest: Tales of the Matter Market*, presented in Berlin (2007), the San Diego Museum of Art (2008), Oi Futuro, and FILE festivals in Brazil (2008). In 2015 the mother of one of his students claimed that her daughter was forced to perform nude for her final exam in the class. UCSD officials defended Dominguez saying that the course is not required for graduation and that removing clothing is not a requirement to pass. Dominguez described the prompt in an interview with HyperAllergic, "The students are aware of the “nude/naked” gesture choice from the start of the class. The options are clarified on the first day of class and are also on the syllabus. Students learn that they can do the gesture in any number of ways without actually having to remove their clothes. There are many ways to perform both “nudity” (to do a gesture without clothes) or to do a “naked” gesture (laying bare of one’s most fragile and vulnerable self). One can be naked while being covered.... I maintain an open dialogue with all the students about any concerns or questions they may have both individually or as a group during every 3 hour class (which meets twice a week)."

References

External links

Homepage: RicardoDominguez.net

Interview with Ricardo Dominguez
Reclamations Blog {{DEFAULTSORT:Dominguez, Ricardo 1959 births Living people American academics of Mexican descent Civil disobedience in the United States Florida State University alumni Educators from El Paso, Texas Politics and technology University of California, San Diego faculty Utah State University alumni Academics from Texas