The Transreal book is now available!
The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities is now available on Amazon.com. I am so thrilled to say that my new book was released in February 2012. I hope you enjoy it and if you write a review, please let me know! Or if you know of a university or bookstore that would like to host an event, please comment on this post and I’ll get back to you via email. Thank you!
From the back cover:
“In this daring and poetic study, Micha Cárdenas guides us through the world of the transexual, the transgenerational, the transpolitical, the transborder. The transreal is both a multilayered space and an existential condition. Brilliant.”
Diana Taylor, University Professor, Performance Studies and Spanish, New York University
“The book itself, a provocative combination of theory, art, and autobiography, is at once a field guide, operating manual, and diary that embodies the mobile, mixed realities that it activates and describes, bringing together erotics and ethics within its calls to action.”
Jordan Crandall, Associate Professor, Visual Arts, UC San Diego
“Micha Cárdenas and her playmates are ontological guerrillas who know that blowing up the dominant order of power/knowledge is only the first step towards real revolution. The crucial next step is materializing virtual possibilities immanent in our current situation.”
Susan Stryker, Associate Professor, University of Arizona
The Place of the Personal in Art/Theory Interdisciplinary Scholarship?
repost from my HASTAC blog.
As an artist/theorist, I find myself thinking a lot lately about the place of the personal in my work, and I wonder how other HASTAC scholars and readers think about these issues.
A major part of my aesthetic as a performance artist has been a choice to place personal risk and intimacy at the core of my art practice. This choice is inspired by artists such as Carollee Schneeman, Sophie Calle, Marina Abramovic and Ulay, Linda Montano and Hannah Wilke, who have chosen to make their personal lives and the intimate relationships the subject of their work. Often, this is a feminist strategy of making the personal political. As Chris Kraus writes in I Love Dick, an intensely personal and theoretical book of memoir/fiction:
Let a girl choose death — Janis Joplin, Simone Weil– and death becomes her definition, the outcome of her “problems.” To be female till means beng trapped within the purely psychological. No matter how dispassionate or large a vision of the world a woman formulates, whenever it includes her own experience and emotion, the telescope’s turned back on her. (196)
In another part of the book, on the work of Hannah Wilke, Kraus says that Wilke’s work was focused on the question “If women have failed to make ‘universal’ art because we’re trapped within the ‘personal,’ why not universalize the ‘personal’ and make it the subject of our art?” (211)
I am very seriously interested in these questions as they pertain to scholarship and in my role as, or performance of, an artist/theorist. As I write my essay the upcoming Marxism and New Media conference at Duke, I am not sure how much, if any at all, personal experience to include. Does my role as a performance artist stop when I am writing academic papers, in the drive for legitimacy? Does personal experience and emotion somehow necessarily devalue scholarly work? As a performance artist, I am not sure if the personal cost of using my life in my work is worth the outcome, or if I would be satisfied not including my personal experience in my work.
These questions also apply to other people who create personal artwork as part of their scholarship, including poets and writers. Here I am thinking ofJeanne Jo in the iMAP PhD program at USC as well as Margaret Rhee and her current project on queer love poems. It seems queer theory in general, as well as feminist theory, has a major stake in one’s personal relationship to one’s material, as much as many scholars attempt to have an “objective” approach. How are reviewers, for journals or for tenure, supposed to be “objective” when evaluating work of mine that deals with intimate details of my life?
I find that academic frequently supports and perhaps encourages certain categories of people to do certain categories of work, like the queer people doing queer theory, indigenous people writing indigenous theory, mixed race people studying critical mixed race theory, the list goes on. What are the implications and limitations of this? Is it something we should support with our own scholarship or break away from?
Additionally, as digital media scholars and artists, the lines between personal and scholarly are often blurred in online contexts. While I could choose to do things differently, and visitor to my Flickr page may see images of my artwork or images of my personal life, and similarly with Facebook. How do you deal with these issues?
The HASTAC Community, Standards and Seeing Interdisciplinary Connections
This year, I’m a HASTAC Scholar, which means I’m blogging both on this site and on theirs. Actually, since this site is mostly for announcements, I do most of my blogging over at HASTAC nowadays. I’m posting part of this entry here to help spur more discussion about these topics.
http://hastac.org/blogs/michacardenas/2011/11/26/hastac-community-standards-and-interdisciplinarity
The recent discussion in the thread Community Standards for Virtual Spaces was spurred by, among other posts, my post of Elle Mehrmand’s performance fauxlographic. The post contained an image from the performance which contained nudity, and therefore the HASTAC site admins edited my post to remove the image and link to the UCSD Visual Art Department‘s website which is hosting the image. I wish that this wasn’t two weeks before the end of the semester and I didn’t have two papers to write, on top of conference papers, publisher deadlines and deadlines for galleries for spring shows, so that I had more time to respond. Still, I am eager to post a few thoughts in response to the very rich discussions which have taken place in the standards forum.
First, I want to state in response to Fiona’s self described “disjointed” comment, which was actually very compelling and apparently very heartfelt, that I love HASTAC. I have met some of my nearest and dearest colleagues in academic thanks to HASTAC, as well as developed sone wonderful friendships. I even met my current PhD advisor, Jack Halberstam, in the HASTAC forum on Queer and Feminist New Media Spaces. I am joining in this discussion with the best of intentions, in order to participate as a HASTAC scholar in making HASTAC as amazing, participatory and transformative as I believe it can be. I am so grateful to the HASTAC scholars, to Fiona and Cathy and everyone who makes HASTAC possible and holds open this space for artistic, academic and theoretical experimentation.
Second, I am very concerned about the suggestion that the legal Terms of Service be used as the basis for the Community Standards document. Among other things, the Terms of Service prohibits posting any material which is “offensive… vulgar, obscene, profane, or is racially, ethnically or is otherwise objectionable;… (iii) Content that is pornographic, sexually explicit or contains nudity; … Content which contains software, software viruses… links to other websites that contain Content not in compliance with the Terms of Service” These restrictions, as I understand them, could be easily interpreted to disallow Critical Code Studies discussions of software code for computer viruses, The Queer and Feminist New Media forum’s discussion of Monica Ong’s skin whitening remedy for asian women, Alexis Lothian’s vidding discussion which links to erotic (possibly pornographic) vid remixes of Battlestar Galactica, and a whole host of other very important discussions on HASTAC regarding the intersections of digital culture with art, race, gender, sex and ability and how those intersections inform our understanding of comtemporary power and social control.
The point made by John Carter McKnight is central, I think, in that the real problem here is self-policing at the risk of preventing important discussions of contemporary issues. I cited Ai Weiwei’s recent tweet saying ”if they see nudity as pornography then china is stuck in the Qing dynasty” not to be snarky, but to point to the fact that these issues are very contemporary and global. The removal of Elle Mehrmand’s poster for fauxlographic cannot be separated from the fact that her performance is about Iran and Wikileaks. Her body parts as covered or uncovered in that flyer are a direct response to the headscarves worn by Muslim women and the perception of certain types of bodies as terrorist bodies, the agency of women to choose to over or uncover themselves and the rhetorics of American exceptionalism which would present the US as a rational place of democracy in contrast to an oppressive regime which forces women to cover their bodies in order to justify military action against Iran.
By removing her flyer, HASTAC is reproducing the act of forcing women’s bodies to be covered up which Iran and other middle eastern countries are accused of as a justification for war, and doing so under a heteronormative rhetoric of protecting the children.
Short Interview with Riku Matsuda on KPFK
Listen to me being interviewed by Riku Katsuda on Flip the Script on KPFK!
We talked about virus.circus in the Speculative show at LACE!
Click here to listen (it’s the last 10 minutes):
http://archive.kpfk.org/parchive/mp3/kpfk_110808_200030matsuda.MP3
Cyborg Culture :: virus.circus :: video of our talk at CRCA Exchange
The Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA) is pleased to invite you to:
CRCA Exchange #6 : Cyborg Culture
Featuring CRCA/Calit2 researchers Elle Mehrmand, Micha Cardenas and Nick Butko.
Friday April 8, 5pm – 7pm
CRCA Performative Computing Lab
Room 1606
Atkinson Hall
UCSD Voigt Drive, La Jolla
Presentations are followed by refreshments and are open to the public.
virus.circus
Elle Mehrmand (MFA, UCSD Visual Arts) and Micha Cardenas (Interim Technical Director for Sixth College) present experiments in Mixed Reality Performance Art, using the body as an instrument to produce sounds to bridge multiple realities and explore queer futures of resistance to biopower
Machine Perception Lab
Nicholas Butko (Postdoctoral Fellow, UCSD Machine Perception Lab) will discuss the past, present, and future of machine perception technologies. The last decade saw the advent of truly perceptive technologies, such as digital cameras that decide to take pictures when they perceive that you smile, or the XBox Kinect, which perceives over twenty distinct parts of the human body. Already, machine perception technologies are leading to significant advances in health, safety, marketing, education, and art. Yet for all this achievement, current techniques are severely limiting further progress. In the second half of his talk, Dr. Butko will discuss projects in UCSD’s Machine Perception Laboratory that explore new paradigms in machine perception related to active, self-taught learning.
CRCA Exchange is a series of free lecture and discussion events open to the general public. The organizers would appreciate it if you could share this announcement with any relevant distribution lists to which you have access.
The CRCA Exchange series is supported by The Center for Research in Computing and the Arts, in conjunction with Calit2 and the UCSD 50th Anniversary.
URL: http://crca.ucsd.edu/exchange/
virus.circus.probe // 5 min excerpt // somatic SENSOR, Highways Performance Space
virus.circus.probe // 5 min excerpt // somatic SENSOR, Highways Performance Space from micha cardenas on Vimeo.
…testing for viral contamination…
…due to recent viral outbreaks, protective latex barriers must be worn at all times…
…the hysteria is everywhere…
…touching, and illness, are prohibited by law…
…skin to skin contact may result in viral contamination…
virus.circus is an episodic series of performances exploring possible queer futures of latex sexuality and DIY medicine in resistance to a speculative world of virus hysteria. The performances use wearable electronics, soft sensors and live audio to bridge virtual and physical spaces. The history of queer politics shows that the rhetoric of viruses such as HIV are used to control marginalized populations, while the present transnational politics of viruses such as H1N1 unearth the militarization of medical authority, microscopic migrations and global inequities.
…For your protection and the protection of others, you may be asked to wear a mask…
…The virus must be contained…
Code switching between mixed and alternate reality, virus.circus asks how we can use reality as a medium, resonating across a number of modes including public space interventions, performances in museums and galleries and networked performances. Wearable sensors allow the performers to experiment with transreal embodiment, performing with their physical bodies and Second Life avatars simultaneously.
//
elle mehrmand // http://elleelleelle.org
micha cárdenas // http://transreal.org
videography by frankie martin
performed at somatic SENSOR
highways performance space
santa monica, california
january 2011