After Man: Trans Ecologies in Media Art

It is clear that as parts of the world receive the COVID-19 vaccine, and return to some sense of “normalcy”, that normalcy is the horror of colonial, racial capitalism and ecological catastrophe. In March 2020, human societies around the globe ground to a halt as shelter-in-place orders required billions of people to stay indoors, to stop the spread of the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19. The possibility of an end of human society became real, as well as the possibility of global solidarity. Yet, as the virus is beginning to be better understood and fought back by multiple vaccines, societies are reopening. With those reopenings, the horrors of ethnic cleansing, police murders, global anti-blackness and mass shootings mark the return to “normal”. This moment has been claimed by activists around the world as a moment to move closer to liberation, to abolition, to freedom from colonial violence. This book asks, what new possibilities for justice might be imagined if we move past the limitations of ethics and politics that depend on a claim to humanity, if we acknowledge that the concept of the human has always been a weapon to define who is killable. Through discussions of media artworks by myself including Sin Sol (2020), contemporary artists including Ursula Biemann and the television show Westworld, this talk considers the markers of what “makes us human,” and identifies how each of those markers has been surpassed, and what new possibilities lie beyond it.

micha cárdenas, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Performance, Play & Design, and Critical Race & Ethnic Studies, at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she directs the Critical Realities Studio. Her book Poetic Operations, available now from Duke University Press, proposes algorithmic analysis as a method for developing a trans of color poetics. cárdenas’s co-authored books The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities (2012) and Trans Desire / Affective Cyborgs (2010) were published by Atropos Press. She is co-editor of the book series Queer/Trans/Digital at NYU Press, with Amanda Philips and Bo Ruberg.