Workshops
I work on numerous educational projects as an artist and scholar. These include lecturing at UCDavis and California College of the Arts, as well as guest teaching at universities, including in the Graduate Program in Social Art Practice and the Graduate Design Program of California College of the Arts, in Public Art at UC Santa Cruz, and elsewhere; being on the committees for two excellent Master's Thesis - Michael Lucenkiw's Flora Machina: A Defensible Cyborg Landscape for his Masters of Landscape Architecture, University of Manitoba in 2014; and Mabel Negrete's When the Invisible Punishing Machine is Everywhere: How Mechanism of Social Control (Mass Incarceration, Institutionalized Racism, Slavery and Repression) in the USA Shapes the Individual as Well as the Social Space for her Masters of Science in Art, Culture and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston in 2011; being a professional mentor for MAWA: Mentoring Artists for Women in the Arts in Winnipeg; and being an informal mentor to numerous artists.
2022 Embodied Vocabularies, performance workshop in the Indigenous Knowledge & Anti-Racist Education graduate course at the University of Alberta, Canada.
2022 Memes as Social Practice Residency workshop with the Taking Art to the Streets course in the Environmental Art & Social Practice program of the University of California at Santa Cruz. In this workshop, students combined public and digital art approaches to the meme as a tool for reimagining public perceptions on the prison industrial complex, policing, and abolition.
2020 La Milpa en Tiempos de Pandemia (La Milpa in Pandemic Times) live from Oakland and Oaxaca Techno-Tamaladas Webinar/Dialogo with project collaborators Charlotte Sáenz and Ben Simmons, hosted by Pro Arts Gallery & COMMONS.
2022 Embodied Vocabularies, performance workshop with students at the University of Alberta, Canada.
2019 Temporary Utopias in the Necro-Techno Complex. In the 2019 Summer Institute of Performance Studies, Bring It In: Transnational Feminisms in Practice, of the Center for Global Culture and Communication & the Department of Performance Studies at Northwestern University, Chicago.
2019 Dissident Bodies: Activism Beyond Citizenship and the State. Workgroup co-convener/co-leader. Mexico City, Mexico Encuentro of the Hemispheric Institute for Performance & Politics in the Americas. With Dr. Peter Kulchyski.
2018 Temporary Utopias in the Extractocene. Taught as part of the Pocha Nostra 10-day interdisciplinary workshop at SOMArts exploring the concept of the “city in ruins” and artist-driven responses to the predatory politics of urban land-use.
2017 Liveness. Co-taught with Theo Pelmus and Kristin Snowbird, LIVE 2017 Biennale, Vancouver, Canada
2017 A Pluriversal Approach to Practice. University of San Francisco. For Cesar Chavez Activism Week: Arte, Accion y Activismo.
2017 Tech Safety for Activists and Community: A Free Viral Workshop. KALA Art Institute, Berkeley, California, as part of Jennifer Wofford's installation Mettle Detection.
2017 Tech Safety for Activists and Community: A Free Viral Workshop. California Institute for Integral Studies, San Francisco, California
2017 Tech Safety for Activists and Community: A Free Viral Workshop. University of California at Davis, Davis, California
2016 Decolonizing Academic and Aesthetic Practices. University of California at Davis. For the ‘Unsettling Performance’ group of the Performance Studies Doctoral Program.
2016 Dissident Bodies: Activism Beyond Citizenship and the State. Workgroup co-convener/co-leader. Santiago, Chile Encuentro of the Hemispheric Institute for Performance & Politics in the Americas. With Drs. Peter Kulchyski and Smaro Kamboureli.
2015-16 Mapping Myself: Decolonizing Art Practices. Program design, curriculum design, and teaching through 2-dimensional, digital and storytelling media. Sited this project with Indigenous youth at the Ndinawe Youth Resource Center, Winnipeg. Developed with funding and support from Urban Shaman Contemporary Aboriginal Art Gallery, and Thomas Sill Foundation, Canada.
2014 Artist as Repertoire. Workgroup co-convener/co-leader. Montreal, Canada Encuentro of the Hemispheric Institute for Performance & Politics in the Americas. With Drs. Serna & Crowe.
ON HIATUS DUE TO COVID19 - PARTICIPATORY WORKSHOPS:
Dr. Pilar, your visit has been life changing for me. My rural upbringing has left me with a healthy skepticism about techno fixes and an instinctive affection for the plural possibilities of presence, but the necro of techno has really hit home for me through your work. I knew our techno addition is overworking us to death and producing cascading disinformation. I knew there was waste, but I had no idea just how much, and your whole point about the colonialist values informing tech has really sifted into my imagination…
inversions
Capital has instrumentalized technology to evict humans from Earth into the alienated World. How to operate in this present-day simulacrum that bestows the illusion of truth to the lies of Western democracy, freedom, justice, liberty and agency – while dealing cascading blows to agency, resistance, and transgression? The Inversions Workshop helps participants develop strategic inversions to interpret the material impacts of the simulacrum, and act by engaging with planetary life. Not a return to origins in nation/state remnants of the colonial catastrophe, to modes of production and engagement of the past, or to a dichotomous innocence - but an embracing of the ambiguity of partial knowledge and the paradoxical conundrums of the present. This workshop creates pathways to resistance and resurgence in the face of totalizing technological domination and control. For more information, please send us a note via our contact form below.
BIOTIC-TECH TOOLS
If you desire to work in community with Biotic Tech methods and tools, this workshop provides data and resources for immediate engagement. Learn about, support and engage with critical youth led movements; student movements; self-determination projects; autonomous technology projects; with groups making dataveillance corporations more transparent and resisting the militarization and use by ICE of Google and Microsoft products; and much more. This workshop is framed through wonder - focused not on hope, but on plugging in to the wondrous initiatives being done right now.
This workshop is held for groups, is pay what you can, and all proceeds are donated to Earth Guardians. Earth Guardians is a growing movement with youth at the forefront empowering them as leaders and amplifying their impact. Earth Guardians and 21 youth plaintiffs are suing the United States federal government for the right to clean air, clean water, and a healthy future.