mixed relations won the UCIRA Emerging Fields Award!

I’m so happy to share the news that mixed relations, a project proposed by myself and Elle Mehrmand, is the recipient of a grant from the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts! This is the next big project I’ll be working on for the next year, and it should be done by next spring. You can read a brief description of the project here…

mixed relations by Elle Mehrmand and Micha Cárdenas

Project Description

“The partners do not precede their relating: all that is, is the fruit of becoming with.”
-Donna Haraway, When Species Meet

mixed relations is a collaboration between Elle Mehrmand and Micha Cárdenas consisting of a series of performances that explore the relations between bodies and technology within mixed realities. The performances will focus on using the body as an instrument and as a site of exploration for performance in mixed realities. The goal is to look at bodies in relation to each other in these realities, as well as in relation to their instruments and to the technologies which extend and multiply them, sonically, visually and physically.

The project will involve two people performing in actual and virtual space. It will include explorations of a number of technologies which bring the body into mixed realities, outside of its daily boundaries, beyond the skin. Live audio synthesis will be achieved using Max/MSP to respond to body movements. These movements will be detected through various technologies including marker based motion capture, flex sensors, pressure sensors, light sensors, accelerometers and the Nintendo Wii. The performers’ body movements will be mirrored and extended into online 3D networked environments such as Second Life and Opensim, which will be projected into the physical performance space. Simultaneously, live realtime video will be streamed into the virtual performance space, from cameras that are attached to the performers’ bodies. Scaled projections, scale models in virtual space and the projection of virtual instruments onto actual objects will be used to create a mixing of the actual and virtual, blurring the lines between the two.

The performances will explore themes of affective tension and anticipation, techno-fetishism, and D.I.Y. cyborg bodies. Our main inspirations come from the history and traditions of performance art, such as Marina Abramovic and Ulay, Stelarc and Orlan, so we see art concerned primarily with bodies in relation, and the body and technology as the main works we are in conversation with.

While much performance art has looked at relations between people, or has engaged with motion capture technologies, mixed relations seeks to combine the rapidly spreading cultural phenomenon of embodied interfaces, exemplified in the Nintendo Wii, with live collaborative improvisational performance. Through the usage of networked online environments, the bodies of the performers are multiplied and folded, immersed in multiple locations and realities at once, creating another layer of relation. The mixing of realities in this project can be seen as paralleling or exploring of our own personal experiences of queer mixing of genders and sexualities, queering new media.

Virtual worlds such as Second Life are facilitating the development of new identities and genders, which – as of yet – allow for unimagined relations and relationships. Through the use of mixed reality technologies in performance, mixed relations seeks to look closely at these new relationships and how they affect our everyday lives and our horizons of possibility.