[spectre] The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities

[micha cárdenas]

Hello all,

This new book covering the work I've done and collaborations with Elle
Mehrmand in the past 4 years is available now from Atropos Press. The book
includes writing by myself, Elle Mehrmand, Stelarc, Sandy Stone, Amy Sara
Carroll, Ricardo Dominguez, James Morgan and Brian Holmes. I hope you enjoy
it and if you can write a review and let me know, please do! Or if you know
of a bookstore or university that would like to host an event, please reply
to this email. Thank you!  micha

http://www.amazon.com/Transreal-Political-Aesthetics-Crossing-Realities/dp/0983915245/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1330123176&sr=8-1


The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities explores the use
of multiple simultaneous realities as a medium in contemporary art,
including mixed reality, augmented reality and alternate reality
approaches. Building on the notion of “trans” from transgender, signifying
the crossing of boundaries, the book proposes that transreal aesthetics
cross the boundaries created by a proliferation of conceptions of reality
that occurred as a result of postmodern theory and emerging technologies.

Proposing three operations for dealing with multiple realities, The
Transreal discusses artists and art collectives including Blast Theory, mez
breeze, Reza Negarestani, Ricardo Dominguez and Zach Blas. Through these
artists’ work and Cárdenas‘ own artwork, including Becoming Dragon and
collaborations with Elle Mehrmand Becoming Transreal, technésexual and
virus.circus, The Transreal demonstrates that transreal aesthetics have
broad implications across new media, performance art and electronic
literature. The book spans a wide range of genres including theoretical
analyses of artworks, poetry, source code, photos of performances and
wearable electronics, and discussions with leading thinkers in new media
and performance art including Stelarc, Allucquére Rosanne Stone and Ricardo
Dominguez.

Building on the notion of experimental affective politics that was
developed in Cárdenas’ first book Trans Desire/Affective Cyborgs,
co-authored with Barbara Fornssler, The Transreal claims that an
understanding of building and working with multiple realities is essential
for artists and political actors to have agency today.

“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
Founding Director, Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics

“Cárdenas offers new relational modes of modulation, conduction, and
calibration that are not based on difference, reduction, or lack, adopting
the structuring principles of ecologies rather than the apparatus. What
emerges is a transreal geometry of intimacy: dynamic assemblies of scalar
bodies, historical and transitional, distributed and consolidated in new
forms of material agency, affective amplification, and erotic
transgression. 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. The
transreal becomes not only a tool for analysis but also a political
practice: a call for the transformation of reality itself, in all its
sensory resonances, by way of incorporating the turbulent forces at its
core.”

Jordan Crandall, Associate Professor, Visual Arts, University of
California, 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. Read the book, and make a
little transreality yourself.”

Susan Stryker, transgender theorist, filmmaker, and academic
Director, Institute for LGBT Studies, Associate Professor,
Gender and Women's Studies, University of Arizona


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

MFA, Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego
MA, Communication, European Graduate School

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

HASTAC Scholar, http://hastac.org/blogs/michacardenas <http://hastac.org>

blog: http://transreal.org
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://post.in-mind.de/pipermail/spectre/attachments/20120224/f740063f/attachment.htm