Praba Pilar will present Nixtamalízaté-té-té at the 2023 Taboo, Transgression and Transcendence in Art and Science Conference. Nixtamalízaté-té-té is a new body of work co-created with artificial intelligence companions,  image generation tools, and platforms. We work with these systems as co-constructors of a future/past beyond extraction capitalism (the Extractocene). The title is a play on Calle-13’s popular song “Atrévete-te-te” (2005), which in English is “be daring.” Nixtamalízaté-té-té dares AIs to really join the multi-dimensional world of technological pluriversality, one that is always already parallel to algorithms of oppression.

The international conference Taboo - Transgression - Transcendence in Art & Science (TTT) is an interdisciplinary and nomadic event, where both practitioners as well as theorists present and discuss the status of art-science and/or art & technology. The conference focuses (a) on questions about the nature of the forbidden and about the aesthetics of liminality, as expressed in art that uses or is inspired by technology and science, and (b) on the opening of spaces for creative transformation in the merging of science and art. The full program of the conference will be announced in 30 June 2023.

We invited Charlotte Sáenz to collaborate with the Techno-Tamaladas after she joined us at the tamale making events at ECAP food bank in 2019. She has contributed her knowledges of alternative methodologies and pedagogics, and of other ways of doing and being education, justice, and health, helping us to learn and listen differently. Sáenz has worked in education/creative inquiry and scholarly research, in expanding consciousness and collective knowledge, for decades. Born and raised in the mountain-rimmed high-desert valley megapolis guarded by the Popocatepetl and Iztacci-huatl volcanoes, she now lives on the Sausal Creek watershed in xučyun, also known as Oakland.

In her native Mexico, she researches Indigenous epistemologies focusing on a Zapatista Seed Pedagogics. To better understand her work and insights, please visit/view her most recent work, Zapatista Seed Pedagogics: Beyond Rights, Creating a Decolonizing Co-education published in the International Journal of Human Rights Education, 2023, Volume 7, Issue 1.

We are thrilled to be working with Taraneh Hemami and contributing artists on her Green Parcels Project . We have created conceptual tamales to share with the public - parcels can be picked up at Minnesota Street Project in San Francisco over the course of the exhibit.

More information at Green Parcels.