Author: RafaelFajardo

I am a designer, researcher, and educator. I am the founder and director of SWEAT, a loose collaborative dedicated to the creation of socially conscious videogames. I am a co-principle investigator for the P4 Games project and a co-investigator with the Institute for the Digital Humanities at the University of Denver. I am Associate Professor at the University of Denver where I am tenured in the School of Art and Art History. I teach in the Emergent Digital Practices program and in the Game Development program.

How to Get Past Customs Without Giving Up Your Digital Privacy | WIRED

by  on  in SWEAT 3.0

In fact, US Customs and Border Protection has long considered US borders and airports a kind of loophole in the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment protections, one that allows them wide latitude to detain travelers and search their devices. For years, they’ve used that opportunity to hold border-crossers on the slightest suspicion, and demand access to their computers and phones with little… Read more →

The Politics of Public Playfulness (transcript) • A Playful Path

by  on  in Andre Blyth, Ben Lehr, Esteban Fajardo, Rafael Fajardo, research, SowReap, SWEAT 3.0, Teri Galvez, Tommy Hoffmann, Work In Progress

The Politics of Public Playfulness (transcript) • A Playful Path. We kind of get embarrassed to be seen being playful. We kind of get a feeling that it’s illegal to be playful. Because, you know, you’re playful, you go out some place and you’re being playful, and people look at you like that. You know: “What are you doing being… Read more →

Zhang Huan’s Poppy Fields

by  on  in research, SWEAT 3.0

Chinese artist Zhang Huan’s paintings, entitled, “Poppy Fields” are intended to evoke the idea of liberated souls who have undergone the sky burial process that he discovered while traveling through Tibet.

Source: ARTINFO PUBLISHING VIDEO

Blogging here to keep for reference: “who are other artists who are working with images of poppies and what are they doing with them?”

Faces from the Border: We Could Be Them – The New Yorker

by  on  in Carmen Escobar, Crosser, Francisco Ortega, Marco Ortega, Miguel Tarango, Rafael Fajardo, Ryan Molloy, SWEAT 1.0, Tomas Marquez

The father once illegally crossed the border from Mexico; now the son is a border-patrol agent for the United States. On a spring afternoon, I drive along Paisano Drive, in El Paso, and spot shiny white-and-green Border Patrol vans crawling alongside an eighteen-foot fence. The agents seem bored, guarding the world’s most powerful country from possible terrorists, but mostly from… Read more →

Digital Preservation in the Artist’s Studio — Medium

by  on  in SWEAT 3.0

Rhizome’s curator shares best practices for digital preservation beginning at the source within an artist’s studio. It includes a suggestion of offering Art as a Service, with contracts that allow collectors to reliably come back to the studio should they ever experience data loss. Source: Digital Preservation in the Artist’s Studio — Medium This matters to SWEAT because we have… Read more →

Connected Worlds – Interactive ecosystem for @nysci by @design_io

by  on  in research, SowReap, SWEAT 3.0

Large project with NSF funding poetically explores ecosystems at large scale. Blogged here for reference to it’s hardware and software details. Sow/Reap may benefit from their example. Each environment in Connected Worlds runs on a separate machine with software developed with openFrameworks. There are a total of 8 Mac Pros running the whole experience. There is a total of 15 projectors… Read more →