Contents
Atoms Never Touch, a novel, from AK Press in the Emergent Strategy Series. 2023
Poetic Operations:
Trans of Color Art in Digital Media, 2022
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 nonconforming 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.
Duke University Press, January 2022
Praise
— Sasha Costanza-Chock, author of Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need
Trans Futures, Special Issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly, Co-Edited with Jian Neo Chen, 2019
The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities, published in 2012 by Atropos Press
Trans Desire, 2010
Selected Articles
“REENVISIONING HUMANITY micha cárdenas on Wangechi Mutu at the New Museum, New York”, Texte Zur Kunst, September 2023, https://www.textezurkunst.de/en/131/micha-cardenas-wangechi-mutu-reenvisioning-humanity/
Jian Neo Chen, micha cárdenas; “Times to Come: Materializing Trans Times.” TSQ 1 November 2019; 6 (4): 472–480. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-7771639
“Monstrous Children of Pregnant Androids: Latinx Futures After Orlando.” Special Issue on Orlando Pulse Massacre. Gay and Lesbian Quarterly. GLQ (2018) 24 (1): 26-31.
“Imagining A Trans World”, Special Issue on Ursula K. Le Guin. Ada Journal of Gender, New Media and Technology. 12. Alexis Lothian ed. http://adanewmedia.org/2017/11/issue12-cardenas/
“Dilating Destiny: Writing the Transreal Body Through Game Design.” Jump Cut Journal, No. 57. Fall 2016, https://www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/-cardenasDilatingDestiny/index.html
“Trans of Color Poetics: Stitching Bodies, Concepts, and Algorithms.” Scholar and Feminist Online Journal, 13.3. 2016. http://sfonline.barnard.edu/traversing-technologies/micha-cardenastrans-of-color-poetics-stitching-bodies-concepts-and-algorithms/
“Pregnancy: Trans Latina Reproductive Futures.” Transgender Studies Quarterly, Vol. 3, No. 1-2, Pp 48-57. 2016. https://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq/article-abstract/3/1-2/48/91814/PregnancyReproductive-Futures-in-Trans-of-Color?redirectedFrom=fulltext
“Shifting Futures: Digital Trans of Color Praxis.” Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media and Technology, No. 6. 2015. http://adanewmedia.org/2015/01/issue6-cardenas/
“Operation Faust y Furioso: A Trans [ ] Border Play on the Redistribution of the Sensible.” with Amy Sara Carroll, Ricardo Dominguez, Elle Mehrmand and Brett Stalbaum, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Vol. 21 No 1, pp 28-42. 2015
From a Free Software Movement to a Free Safety Movement, Mute Magazine, July 2013
“Blah, Blah, Blah: Kesha Feminism?”, Journal of Popular Music Studies, June 2012
“A Game Level Where You Can’t Pass”, HenryJenkins.org
“Becoming Dragon, A Transversal Technology Study”, CTheory
“The Transborder Immigrant Tool: Violence, Solidarity and Hope in Post-NAFTA Circuits of Bodies Electr(on)/ic”, with the Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0 / b.a.n.g. lab, Mobile HCI 2009 Proceedings
“Watering the Dirt”, No More Potlucks
“virus.circus.mem”, with Elle Mehrmand, digital event ’11, Subversive Technologies, e-fagia
Book Chapters
“Trans Ecologies in Digital Games and Contemporary Art”, in Beke, Laura op de, Joost Raessens, Stefan Werning, and Gerald Farca, eds. Ecogames: Playful Perspectives on the Climate Crisis. Amsterdam University Press, 2024. https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.10819591.23
“The Android Goddess Declaration: After Man(ifestos)”, in Losh, E., and J. Wernimont. Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and the Digital Humanities. University of Minnesota Press, 2019.
“Decolonial Media Praxis: From Cinema to Network” in Keeling, K., and T. Soundararajan. From Third Cinema to Media Justice: Third World Majority and the Promise of Third Cinema. 2019. http://scalar.usc.edu/nehvectors/thirdworldmajority/index
“Dark Shimmers: The Rhythm of Necropolitical Affect.” In Johanna Burton, Reina Gossett and Eric Stanley eds. Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility. MIT Press. December 2017.
“Queer OS: A User’s Manual.” with Zach Blas, Jacob Gaboury, Jessica Marie Johnson, Margaret Rhee and Fiona Barnett. In Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein eds. Debates in the Digital Humanities Vol. 2. University of Minnesota Press. 2016.
“Becoming Dragon, A Transversal Technology Study” in Feminist and Queer Information Studies Reader
Manifesto Now! Instructions for Performance, Philosophy, Politics
“I Am Transreal” in Gender Outlaws, edited by Kate Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman
virus.circus.mem with Elle Mehrmand, Speculative, exhibition catalog
“Becoming Dragon”, Critical Digital Studies Reader