April 11, 2022 at 5:00PM
Cowell Provost House
Author micha cárdenas (CRES/DANM) will present on her new book Poetic Operations: Trans of Color Art in Digital Media (Duke University Press, March 2022)
With responses by fellow UCSC faculty members Gerald Casel (Performance, Play & Design) and Nick Mitchell (CRES/FMST)
About the Book:
In Poetic Operations artist and theorist micha cárdenas considers contemporary digital media, artwork, and poetry in order to articulate trans of color strategies for safety and survival. Drawing on decolonial theory, women of color feminism, media theory, and queer of color critique, cárdenas develops a method she calls algorithmic analysis. Understanding algorithms as sets of instructions designed to perform specific tasks (like a recipe), she breaks them into their component parts, called operations. By focusing on these operations, cárdenas identifies how trans and gender-non-conforming artists, especially artists of color, rewrite algorithms to counter violence and develop strategies for liberation. In her analyses of Giuseppe Campuzano's holographic art, Esdras Parra's and Kai Cheng Thom's poetry, Mattie Brice's digital games, Janelle Monáe's music videos, and her own artistic practice, cárdenas shows how algorithmic analysis provides new modes of understanding the complex processes of identity and oppression and the intersection of gender, sexuality, and race.
About the Author:
micha cárdenas, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Art & Design: Games + Playable Media, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies and Digital Arts and New Media, at the University of California, Santa Cruz.