Autonets: We Already Know and We Don’t Yet Know. Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics VIII Encuentro, São Paulo, Brazil, January 2013, with Micha Cárdenas, Alessandra Renzi, Frantz Jerome, Benjamin Lundberg, Lily Mengesha, Aisha Jordan, Joana Fittipaldi and Tomaz Capobanco. Photos by Macarena Gomez-Barris. Courtesy of the artist.
Local Autonomy Networks (Autonets) is an artivist project focused on creating networks of communication to increase community autonomy and reduce violence against women, LGBTQI people, people of colour and other groups who continue to survive violence on a daily basis. The networks are both online and offline, including handmade wearable electronic fashion and face to face agreements between people. Autonets considers how movement is a technology and how dance and performance can be used to develop networks for community-based responses to violence. The project was started by Micha Cárdenas but expanded into an ecology of artists, hackers and activists. Autonets includes a line of mesh-networked electronic clothing with the goal of building autonomous local networks that don’t rely on corporate infrastructure to function, inspired by anti-racist, prison abolitionist responses to gendered violence. The Autonets garments are prototype that use mesh networking to alert everyone in range who is wearing another Autonet garment that someone needs help and will indicate that person’s proximity. Autonets workshops and performances have included trans and gender non-conforming people of colour in LA, artists and students in São Paulo, sex workers in Toronto and queer youth of colour in Detroit.