email title: Letter of Support for Ricardo Dominguez, bang.lab, and Electronic Disturbance Theater

To the Presidents and Trustees of the University of California:

We are writing as an international group of concerned students and faculty in regard to the series of investigations currently directed against Professor Ricardo Dominguez and his collaborators in the CALIT2 bang.lab. More specifically, we wish to address the following events:

1) On March 21, 2010, a bang.lab colleague at the University of California, Riverside, received notice that he is under investigation in relation to the establishment of the website http://MarkYudof.com, an art protest piece in which the artist expressed an alternate version of the future in which University of California President Mark Yudof publicly resigned his position by acknowledging that his “service as president is detrimental to the future of public education in the state of California.” Despite its obviously unrealistic message on behalf of President Yudof and the multiple links on the site indicating its connection to various student protest groups, both of which clearly identify the site’s political intent and its desire not to defraud its visitors, this artist action has directly resulted in the ensuing investigation.

2) On March 4th, the bang.lab website hosted a virtual sit-in against the website of the University of California Office of the President as part of the system-wide student and faculty protests against the policies of the University of California administration. The virtual sit-in action provided a means for anyone sympathetic to the cause to remotely join the protesters in solidarity. As a direct result of the sit-in action, the University of California, San Diego’s Office of Information Technology Security shut down the bang.lab server’s access to the Internet for eight consecutive days.

3) Following the virtual sit-in, the bang.lab was informed that they were under investigation by the University of California at San Diego Senior Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, Paul Drake, who was also attempting to determine the legal grounds necessary to file criminal charges against Professor Dominguez. If successful, these university and criminal charges would directly threaten the revocation of Professor Dominguez’s tenure at UCSD. Despite already established international legal precedents that virtual sit-ins are considered electronic civil disobedience (ECD) and are therefore not illegal denial-of-service (DoS) or distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks (most recently in the First Penal Senate of the Higher Regional Court of Frankfurt ruling 1 Ss 319/05 in 2005), these publicly unjustified investigations and charges continue.

As academic colleagues of both Professor Dominguez and his collaborators at the bang.lab, we ask that you cease these seemingly politically motivated investigations. Since initiating his digital protests over ten years ago, Professor Dominguez’s activities with the Electronic Disturbance Theater and the bang.lab have served as unflinchingly courageous examples of intellectual integrity and academic engagement within their wider sociopolitical communities. Professor Dominguez’s tireless efforts to bring awareness to underserved and underrepresented causes through the artful mastery of technologies that so often seek to marginalize such groups has inspired multiple generations of artists, activists, and critical thinkers. His recent bang.lab projects have received numerous international humanitarian awards and funding support in both the U.S. and Mexico. We believe these recent actions against him and the bang.lab threaten the academic freedoms and rights to free speech of all artists and academics everywhere. We recommend that rather than criminalizing legitimate protest activity by members of its own community the University of California would be better served by opening up substantive public dialogues with protesters regarding their concerns. For these reasons, we firmly but respectfully call for increased accountability of this process and an end to the bureaucratic and legal harassment of Professor Dominguez and his colleagues.

Sincerely,

lots of people