My first game! A SURVIVOR IS #REBORN a twine game

I am so so happy to announce this game to you all. It’s my first time making a game, and I’m so excited about the possibilities of twine. I’m posting it because I really want feedback on it, so please share it and leave a comment to let me know what you think!

Take the trigger warning seriously folks, it’s a serious game.

A SURVIVOR IS #REBORN is a meditation on violence and transformative justice, a transgender incest survivor’s response to the new Tomb Raider. Take the trigger warning seriously, but try it out if you can and let me know what you think! and pass it on!

Click here to play: A SURVIVOR IS #REBORN

Tons of gooey thanks to porpentine for the huge inspiration and technical advice.

Thank you to merritt kopas, anna anthropy, a.j. liszkiewicz and samantha gorman for inspiration, and to J for telling me about Porpentine’s Ke$ha game!

Call for workshop participants to perform Autonets in an Urban Intervention at the VIII Encuentro of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics

Join my workshop “Building Local Autonomy Networks” from Wednesday to Friday, Jan 16-18 9:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m, Escola de Comunicação e Artes, Unuversity of Sao Paulo at the 8th Enceuntro of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. In the workshop, we will be developing a group movement piece to perform in the Urban Intervention portion of the Enceuntro on Friday, January 17. This site specific movement based performance will be created by the group, using wearable electronics and building on the concepts of networks, autonomy, safety, anti-violence and resistance addressing the local issues that workshop participants introduce.

Workshop – Building Local Autonomy Networks – The Autonets workshop will engage participants in a discussion, using Theater of the Oppressed, dance and performance exercises, of how we can form local networks of autonomy and solidarity in order to create community based responses to violence we face on a daily basis, which may be personal, gendered, racial or state sponsored. This workshop is being presented in collaboration with Cero29 in Bogotá, Colombia.

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 color 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. The networks are being established through a series of workshops, performances, presentations and discussions at art, activist and academic venues in the Americas and Europe. The project was started by Micha Cárdenas but is rapidly expanding into an ecology of networks involving many artists, hackers and activists.

About me…

Micha Cárdenas is an artist/theorist who works at the intersections of bodies, technology, movement and politics. They are a PhD student in Media Arts and Practice (iMAP) at University of Southern California and a member of Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0. Micha’s project Local Autonomy Networks was selected for the 2012 ZERO1 Biennial in San Jose and was the subject of their keynote performance at the 2012 Allied Media Conference. Micha’s book The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities, published by Atropos Press in 2012, discusses art that uses augmented, mixed and alternate reality, and the intersection of those strategies with the politics of gender, in a transnational context. Micha holds an MFA from University of California, San Diego, an MA in Communication from the European Graduate School and a BS in Computer Science from Florida International University. They blog at transreal.org and tweet at @michacardenas.

Queer Viral Practices at SXSW Interactive

I’m so happy about my first ever SXSW presentation. I’ll be performing part of my new book, The Transreal, co-written with many of my favorite artists, so don’t miss it!

reposting with slight edits from zachblas.info…

On March 9th, Zach Blas, Pinar Yoldas, and myself will give artist talks on the Queer Viral Practices in New Media Art and Theory panel at South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, TX. Please come join us if you’ll be around!

Thanks to Rhizome.org for recommending our panel!

Queer Viral Practices in New Media Art and Theory

#sxsw #queerviral

In this panel, we will focus on queer new media art and philosophy that uses and intervenes into the viral to form a radical politics of revolt and utopia. Viral will be engaged with technically, philosophically, artistically, biologically, and effectively. Our aim is to show that while viral rhetoric and discourses have marginalized and controlled queer populations, the viral remains an allusive, volatile potential that can be experimented with toward creating new queer politics and worlds. Cárdenas will discuss her collaboration with Elle Mehrmand, virus.cirus, an episodic series of performances using wearable electronics and live audio to bridge virtual and physical spaces that explores queer futures of latex sexuality amidst a speculative world of virus hysteria and DIY medicine. Blas will speak on new works from his ongoing Queer Technologies project that attempt to formulate a viral aesthetics based on a replicating difference of never-being-the-sameness against capital’s own modulating structure.

How Many Sexual Assaults Happened at #OccupyLA?

[trigger warning]

Repost of my original post from OccupyEverything.org. Please read, RT and comment.

I just got back from having dinner with a friend of mine who spent many nights at OccupyLA. This is a person who I think has a good understanding of gender politics and of what happened at OccupyLA. I was shocked to hear him tell me that there were probably over 10 or over 20 or more cases of sexual assault at OccupyLA. As someone who has been following the tweets, articles, blog posts and when I can the live feed for OccupyLA very closely since it began, I was incredibly disheartened to hear these numbers. My understanding was that there was one case. This says to me that people have been keeping these incidents out of public discussion to protect the movement, which is incredibly upsetting because if the Occupy movement thinks that sexual assault is tolerable in any way than I will be so ashamed that I ever supported them in any way. Clearly, a movement that is so multiplicitous and with such fuzzy boundaries as the Occupy movement can’t be said to hold many or possibly any opinions or priorities, but I would say that it seems like there may have been an effort by many Occupy organizers to keep the number of sexual assaults a secret.

Why is this such a problem? Don’t the people experiencing assault have the right to their privacy? Yes, of course they do, but as a woman and a trans person, I feel like I would have not been safe sleeping at OccupyLA and I wouldn’t have known it until I was there, possibly until it was too late because the issue was kept so well under wraps that someone following the news every day and talking to everyone they knew, including participants, organizers and scholars following the occupations didn’t know at all how prevalent the issue was.

I felt unsafe from my first time at Occupy LA, the first march to City Hall. That day, I was with my girlfriend and two men tried to hit on us and one even grabbed her arm with no invitation at all to do so. I knew from that first moment in the bright daylight that this was not a safe place for me to sleep.

I was so sad to hear these words come from my friend’s mouth, he said that every night you could hear someone yelling “get out! get the fuck out of my tent!” and that there was so much booze and drugs. He also said that the claim that there were many assaults was being used as a right wing “troll” tactic, but that is no excuse for hiding the problem if it exists. He also said that even at the General Assembly, where the issue of assault was discussed two nights, that while many people came to the mic to say that the issue should be discussed (for 10 minutes) that still many others came to the mic to say that the camp is about wall street and not about this issue. Additionally, my friend said that very few women were staying in the camp towards the end near the eviction.

I have also had numerous people ask me, when I bring up the issue of sexual assault at occupations, if this is above the usual number of assaults that happen. As if it mattered? That response is clearly a way of minimalizing and normalizing the issue of sexual assault instead of taking responsibility for the fact that as people who support this movement, even by writing and tweeting about it, we may be supporting the creation of a space where people are sexually assaulted. Now we have to certainly distinguish between different occupations, but if organizers are keeping this issue a secret how can people even know?

I am so incredibly disheartened by this news and I think that as participants in this movement, which I consider myself having been to many rallies and events, and as supporters, we need to understand the extent of this problem. Perhaps this is something that the #OccupyData hackers can try to find, a number of cases of sexual assault at different occupations? How can people accept this? I refuse to participate in a movement which would attempt to create intentional space to envision a new world in which sexual assault is acceptable and should be kept quiet.

To those who would say this is a peripheral issue, I absolutely disagree. I propose that the question as to whether we can create spaces which challenging existing institutions of violence, such as economic inequality, without reproducing and even worsening other institutions of violence, such as a patriarchal rape culture, must be central to the occupation movement. Whose liberation and equality is this movement about?

UPDATE: 1:49pm: I want to add, to be clear, that I am fully in support of prison abolitionist and community based strategies for responding to and preventing sexual violence which increase community autonomy and do not depend on police. That is precisely why the handling of this issue in these autonomous spaces is so important to me. Additionally, I want to add that I am in no way trying to reproduce a gender binary, white centered, class privileged analysis, I fully acknowledge that people of all genders are affected by sexual violence and the most affected groups are transgender women of color and sex workers.

Evacuate Rikers Island

To: lgibbs@cityhall.nyc.gov

To Deputy Mayor Linda Gibbs and Mayor Michael Bloomberg,

As a scholar of race, class and gender issues with a strong concern for the welfare of people imprisoned by the Prison Industrial Complex, it is clear to me that your decision to not evacuate the prisoners of Rikers island is a demonstration of the fact that you think you can decide on these prisoners’ right to survive. I disagree. Your abandoning prisoners in Rikers Island who are clearly in zones in danger of flooding is tantamount to a racial and class biased act of murder. As Mayor, you are responsible for the well being of those you have imprisoned and I wil do my best as an academic in future writings, talks and presentations to call attention to your flagrant disregard for the lives of prisoners under your care. You cannot use the excuse of a weather crisis to further your wishes that these prisoners die without suffering from public attention on your sad, sad behavior.

Sincerely,

micha cárdenas
PhD Student, Media Arts and Practice, School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California
Provost Fellow, University of Southern California

Co-Author, Trans Desire / Affective Cyborgs, Atropos Press, http://is.gd/daO00

Catalyzing Knowledge in Dangerous Times at UC Berkeley

Ricardo Dominguez and myself will be presenting about the Transborder Immigrant Tool at this conference. Come see us!

Date:
Thursday, April 14, 2011 – 9:30am – 8:00pm
Catalyzing Knowledge
in Dangerous Times
Center for Race & Gender Ten Year Anniversary Conference

Thursday, April 14
9:30 am – 5:00 pm
370 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley

Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=196570460375105
Getting to 370 Dwinelle Hall:

http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/Directions+to+Dwinelle+Hall

***

Keynote Lecture:
From Academic Freedom to Academic Abolitionism
Prof. Andrea Smith, UC Riverside

5:30 pm: Reception
6:00 pm – 8:00 pm: Lecture
370 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley
Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=111032582310352

Catalyzing Knowledge in Dangerous Times will explore the ways in which knowledge is politicized, embodied, and imagined within a volatile political climate that targets education as a racialized and gendered battleground for defining legitimacy, visibility, and access.

Conference participants will interrogate the meaning and practice of scholarship in a time shaped by militarism, economic crisis, gender policing, and persistent racism. They will consider methodologies used inside and outside of academia to challenge what and who is known and identify transformative possiblities stemming from the transgression of traditional epistemological boundaries, academic discipline, gender, and nation.

Abstracts below…

Schedule:

9:30 am

Center for Race & Gender at Ten Years
Prof. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Center for Race & Gender
~~~

10:00 am

Media, Maps, & Motion
Moderated by Margaret Rhee, UC Berkeley

Speakers will map the ways in which widely-used technologies can transmit information related to survival strategies across geographic boundaries while subverting policed pathways of communication.

“Like Seeds”: A Cosmic Ecology of Black Feminist Education as Transformation
Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind as a project of BrokenBeautiful Press and the co-creator of the Mobilehomecoming Project

A Tale to Two and Half Investigation: Measuring Institutional Insecurities and Contestational Knowledge
Professor Ricardo Dominguez, UC San Diego

net.walkingtools.Transformer.shift()
Micha Cardenas, UC San Diego

Reels of Resistance: Film IS Social Justice Activism for LGBTQ Communities of Color
Madeleine Kim & Kebo Drew, Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project

~~~

11:30 am

Women of Color Feminist Knowledge
Moderated by Prof. Paola Bacchetta, UC Berkeley

Speakers will explore the race and gender politics of accessing, teaching, and transforming knowledge.

Looking for Resistance in all the Right Places: Centering LGBTQ Youth Testimony in Times of Crisis
Prof. Cindy Cruz, UC Santa Cruz

Imperial Pedagogies: Imagining Internationalist/Feminist/Antiracist Literacies
Prof. Piya Chatterjee, UC Riverside

Pedagogy, Performance, and the Decolonial
Prof. Laura Perez, UC Berkeley

~~~

12:50 pm: LUNCH PROVIDED

~~~

1:40 pm

Educators Organizing Across Borders
Moderated by Erica Boas, UC Berkeley

Presenters will discuss the legacy, perils, and promise of educators organizing across prison borders and colonial projects.

Activist Scholars and the Antiprison Movement
Prof. Julia Oparah (formerly Sudbury), Mills College

Reimagining HIV/AIDS Prevention Education Within A Jail System
Isela González, MPA and Allyse Gray, Forensic AIDS Project

Academic Freedom, or Academic Responsibility? Agency within the Brain of the Monster
Prof. Nada Elia, Antioch University

Administering Palestine on Campus and Constructed “Check-Points.”
Dr. Hatem Bazian, UC Berkeley

~~~

3:00 pm

Sparking, Defending, and Envisioning
Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley
Moderated by Prof. Harvey Dong, UC Berkeley

Presenters will explore the inception and political imagination of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley.

Staging Hunger, Embodying Pain: Some Queer Thoughts on Campus Organizing
Prof. Sara Kaplan, UC San Diego

*Tokenized, Romanticized, and Professionalized*: Establishing the Significance and Urgency of Decolonizing the University
Ruben Elias Canedo Sanchez, UC Berkeley

From 1969 to the Present: A Brief History Outlining the Critical Role of Women of Color in the Struggle for Ethnic Studies
Ziza Delgado, UC Berkeley

~Title forthcoming~
Prof. Nelson Maldonado-Torres, UC Berkeley/Rutgers University

~~~

4:30 pm

Conference Synthesis

~~~

5:30 pm

Reception

~~~

6:00 pm

Keynote Talk:
From Academic Freedom To Academic Abolition
Prof. Andrea Smith, UC Riverside

Featuring poets & performers, Luna Maia, OLO, Jezebel Delilah X, & Maya Chinchilla

PLUS an exhibit of Ethnic Studies political art by
Favianna Rodriguez, Jesus Barraza, & Natalia Garcia Pasmanick,
curated by Elisa Diana Huerta, Multicultural Community Center, UC Berkeley

Made possible by the generous support of the Multicultural Community Center, Department of Ethnic Studies, Native American Studies, African American Studies, Center for New Racial Studies, Center for the Study of Sexual Cultures, Townsend Center for the Humanities, Gender & Women’s Studies Department, Center for the Study of Social Change, Berkeley Center for New Media, Mixed Blood: A Literary Journal, Department of Rhetoric, the Haas Diversity Research Center, the Cal Corps Public Service Center, American Cultures Engaged Scholarship, Berkeley La Raza Law Journal, and the Women of Color Initiative

Media, Maps, & Motion

A Tale to Two and Half Investigation: Measuring Institutional Insecurities and Contestational Knowledge
Professor Ricardo Dominguez, UC San Diego

Between January 11th, 2010 and November 10th, 2010 Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0 and b.a.n.g. lab, two collaborative artivist research groups based at CALIT2/UCSD (a transdisciplinary institute), and Professor Ricardo Dominguez one of the co-founders of both projects found themselves under two and half investigation over their work on Transborder Immigrant Tool, their Electronic Civil Disobedience (ECD) performances against UCOP on March 4th,2010 by both UCSD and UCOP administrations. Professor Dominguez was also under investigation by FBI Cyberdivision for potential federal violations for the ECD artivist gesture in solidarity with statewide actions on against the student fee hikes across the UC system. What can learn about the state of artivist practices and research within the UC system and its response to contestational knowledge?

net.walkingtools.Transformer.shift()
Micha Cardenas, UC San Diego

The Transborder Immigrant Tool is a polyvalent, polygendered, collectively created project, a multiplicity. On one level, it is a J2ME java based application that allows users to access the GPS receiver function of a cheap cell phone without having service. On another level, it is an attempt to create an augmented geography, placing a transreal layer of information over the treacherous desert terrain of the US/Mexico border. Our collective imagines the phone as a biopolitical gesture, an experiment in Science of the Oppressed, a form of poetic sustenance and a media virus. In this lecture/performance I will discuss how the TBT conjures spirits of mayan and queer technologies, as well as fears and realities of technology’s ability to disturb borders: national, gender, genre, disciplinary, fiction/non.