Bay Area/Colombian Praba Pilar is a performance artist, technologist and cultural theorist exploring aspects of emerging technologies which generate new forms of economic, environmental and sexual exploitation and erasure. Deeply rooted in Latino communities, she has spent the last decade presenting site works, performances, street theatre, writing and websites which provide a counternarrative to the overarching rhetoric about the beneficence of biotechnology, information technology, and nanotechnology. Her projects include the Church of Nano Bio Info Cogno; the Cyborg Soap Opera; Computers Are A Girl’s Best Friend; El World Brain Disorder; Humaquina: Manifest Tech-Destiny; Techno-Promesas: Putografia Virtual; Global Warmaquina; Edu-Maquina: De-Educacion; and Webopticon: Arquitectura of Control.

Pilar is currently researching the work of multiple generations of Latino artists whose contestational performances challenge discourses and practices generated by Western governments with neo-liberal economic agendas; multi-national corporations which have centralized the life sciences industry; military industrial complexes developing advanced weaponry and robotics; and universities promoting their labs. These centers of power have saturated the world with the hegemonic discourse that advanced technologies will solve poverty, disease and hunger, while at the same time effectively silencing their critics. This has laid the ground for a deployment of international development policies which are in actuality detrimental not only to economies of the Third World, but to ecosystem on a global scale.

In May of 2010, Ms. Pilar will be presenting her performance project, the Church of Nano Bio Info Cogno, on a panel titled The Multispecies Annex: Promissory Futures of Biocapitalism, as part of the Natureculture: Entangled Relations of Multiplicity Conference. This will be held May 7-8, 2010 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, by the Society for Cultural Anthropology.

Pilar’s collaborative and solo work has been featured at Center for the Arts at Yerba Buena, the Museum of the African Diaspora, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Studio XX and the Darling Foundry in Montreal, the Museum of World Culture in Sweden and the Arte Nuevo Interactiva '05 Biennial in Mexico. Her performances have been presented at universities, galleries, conferences and public streets throughout the United States. Pilar is the recipient of numerous awards, including the UC Davis Presidential Pre-Doctoral Award, the Puffin Foundation Award, the Creative Capital Award, the Creative Work Fund Award, and the Potrero Nuevo Fund Award and two nominations for a Rockefeller Award. Her work has been featured in cTheory magazine; in the books TechKnowledgies: New Imaginaries and Transmigrations in the Humanites, Arts and TechnoSciences, edited by Mary Valentis (2007); in Naked on the Internet, by Audacia Ray (2007); and in The Civil Disobedience Handbook: A Brief History and Practical Advice for the Politically Disenchanted, edited by James Tracy (2002). She was featured in a book on inspirational women by Cathleen Rountree, On Women Turning Thirty: Making Choices, Finding Meaning (2000). She can be visited online at: http://www.prabapilar.com.