micha cárdenas (THEA and DANM) has a series of upcoming virtual talks about her forthcoming book Poetic Operations: Trans of Color Art in Digital Media and recent and upcoming artworks, viewable online!
- October 12th at the ASA (American Studies Association), the panel “Trans of Color Poetics and Lesbian Potentiality” from 12-1:45PM EST will include a discussion of Poetic Operations and Rox Samer’s forthcoming book as well!
- October 13th speaking engagement at the Augmented Senses symposium on Queer and Feminist AR.
- October 21st from 3-5pm PDT speaking engagement at the Tarble Arts Center as part of the Force Majeure exhibition, where you can see Sin Sol.
- October 28th at 5pm PDT event in dialog with Susan Stryker at Mills College about Poetic Operations and trans of color poetics.
- Also, at the New School on November 8th speaking about Poetic Operations at “Performance in the Age of Pandemic” Click here to register!
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 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
“In this beautifully written book, micha cárdenas directs us to look at how the algorithm, as analytic and praxis, holds the possibility of trans of color survival. Deftly moving across numerous geographies, texts, and fields of inquiry, Poetic Operations is a bold contribution to trans of color studies.” — C. Riley Snorton, author of Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity
“micha cárdenas’ powerful new work extends intersectionality as a mode for understanding the relationships between race, class, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, and other axes of power, oppression, and resistance. Doing important theoretical and analytical work in its analysis of trans of color media arts practice, Poetic Operations will be useful for those working in media studies, digital studies, trans studies, and art history, as well as anyone interested in interrogating power.”
— Sasha Costanza-Chock, author of Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need
This project was supported in part by a grant from the Arts Research Institute at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Program at UC Santa Cruz, which provided funds toward the publication of this book.
