Lecture respondents: Professor Ken Goldberg (Berkeley Center for New Media), PhD candidate Ashley Ferro-Murray (Performance Studies, Designated Emphasis in New Media), and PhD candidate Heather Rastovac (Performance Studies, Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality).

This lecture will address Baradaran’s past and current artistic works involving Augmented Reality (AR) and pose critical questions for the future of AR and art practice. Under the title FutARism, Baradaran suggests that AR presupposes significant conceptual shifts, as it expands our definitions of ownership and trespassing while triggering dialogue about a new medium for interactive installations. The experiential, conceptual, and legal shifts presupposed by the advent of AR connect to Baradaran's interest in radical subjectivities, failed utopias, and mysticism.

Following its Paris premiere in June 2012 at the CitéInternationale des Arts, Amir Baradaran’s performance of Marry Me to the End of Love will make its U.S. debut during his UC Berkeley campus visit. In this interactive performance, Baradaran will marry anyone he can convince to enter a temporary marriage. This playful, performative act of marriage draws from the Shi’a Islamic tradition of temporary marriage (Sigheh) and attempts to introduce these traditions into the performance art lexicon. Baradaran first introduced the idea of Sigheh when he infiltrated Marina Abramovic’s live sculpture, The Artist is Present at the New York MoMA, thereby creating his own guerilla performance, The Other Artist is Present, and proposing marriage to her: “I love your bodies of work... and I would love to be wedded to this body, here and now.”

Baradaran will be participating on a panel entitled “Re-Traditioning The Verse: Poetry to Performance” in the ReOrient Forum in San Francisco on Sunday, November 18 at 3:15pm. ReOrient 2012 will turn San Francisco into a mecca for innovative, spirited, and thought-provoking theatre and performance from and about the Middle East. To add to the conversation, Golden Thread is presenting the ReOrient Forum, a special weekend of artistic dialogue, presentations, and performances in conjunction with the festival.