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.
Trans-Reality Television: The Transgression of Reality, Genre, Politics, and Audience offers an overview of contributions which engage with the phenomenon of reality television as a tool to reflect on societal and mediated transformations and transgressions. While some contributors delve deep into the theoretical issues, others approach the topic at hand through empirical studies of specific reality television formats and programs. The chapters in this volume are divided into four sections, all of which deal with how we see the fluid social at work in reality television through the trans-real, trans-politics, trans-genre, and trans-audience. The first section stresses the concept of the trans-real. These chapters go into the complexity of the construction of reality in reality television. The second section, which deals with the concept of trans-politics, offers a diversity of perspectives on the articulation and re-articulation of politics and the political. In the third section, trans-genre, the chapters analyze how the modern conceptualizations of genre and format are transcended. Finally, the last set of chapters articulate the concept of trans-audiences, using case studies of particular audiences and a study of reality celebrities. Trans-Reality Television concludes by returning to the sense and nonsense of the use of these 'post' concepts.
Reviews for Trans Desire: Micha Cardenas takes apart the terms and implicit contract binding the project of "Master Thesis." What is it to master an object of inquiry that resists boundary control or conceptual arrest? How does one pursue a thesis when genre and gender assignments are continually destabilized? Situated between soft rant and manifesto, between autobiographeme and scholarship, between single and double authorship, _Trans Desire_ bravely faces down the quirky habits of our bildopedic culture, reformatting the very conditions of institutional submission. Avital Ronell In this powerful meta-account of transgressive embodiments and desires, Cardenas enunciates a rousing, theoretically complex and practically explicit politic of resistance which will resonate with scholar and layperson alike. Allucquere Rosanne Stone In Trans Desire, Micha Cardenas offers a moving and provocative exploration of transgender desire, its limits, and its potential for biopolitical resistance. At an intersection of poetics and theory, Cardenas embraces a queer ethico-politics devoted to radically challenging not only heteronormativity but the oppressive power of Empire more broadly. Diane Davis Affective Cyborgs is framed as a necessary departure from Donna Haraway's cyborg. Appropriated from the complex sexual politics of BDSM culture, the figure of the "switch" is proposed as a new possibility for conceptualizing agency in our encounters with technology. A doubling of the cyborg body, the switch locates the liminal space in which the binary of dominance and submission may be explored as a contextual and meshed embodiment of contingency, materialized via affective decision. This framing suggests new directions for feminist philosophies of technology. About the authors: Micha Cardenas [transreal.org] is an artist/theorist and a Lecturer in the Visual Arts Department and the Critical Gender Studies program at the University of California, San Diego. She received her MA in Communication at the European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, Switzerland and her MFA from UCSD. Barbara Fornssler is a PhD student at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, and a writer whose research interests include the body and technology, multimodal communication, and philosophies of gender.
Nine wild, weird and wondrous stories, written together by Rucker and Sterling. What do you get if two cyberpunk masters spend thirty years writing tales about transreally warped versions of themselves? A unique perspective on giant ants, flying jellyfish, Soviet rocketeers, runaway genomics, Silicon Valley, and the death of the Universe. With notes by the authors and an introduction by Rob Latham.
Artist and theorist micha cárdenas considers contemporary digital media, artwork, and poetry in order to articulate trans of color strategies of safety and survival.
Brace yourself when you open this book, for it purports to be the about the visions of neat biotechnologies one Frank Shook brings back from future times where he has been taken to by flying saucers, and gives to the writer, Rudy Rucker, who's telling the story. That's an odd way to begin a work of popular science . . . . but amusing. Please heed the warning from the Introduction by Bruce Sterling: "If you are examining Saucer Wisdom imagining that Rudy (or some fictional 'Frank Shook') has been actually logging a lot of on board saucer time, well, you can knock that off right now. Rudy Rucker made up the flying saucer part. There is no actual flying saucer. The saucer is not an interplanetary faster-than-light device. Its what we professional authors like to call a narrative device. "I'm going to spill the beans as directly as I can here: Saucer Wisdom is a work of popular science speculation. Its a nonfiction book in which Prof. Rucker takes a few quirky grains of modern scientific fact, drops them into the colorful tide pool of his own imagination, and harvests a major swarm of abalones, jellyfish, and giant anemones. "Pop-science writers didn't used to treat 'science' in this boisterous way, but there might well be a trend here, there may be a real future in this. Saucer Wisdom is a book by a well-qualified mathematician and computer scientist, a veteran pop science writer, in which 'science' is treated, not as some distant and rarefied quest for absolute knowledge, but as naturally great source material for a really long, cool rant." Rucker, in character, describes, and illustrates with delightful cartoon sketches (the way he would use chalk and a blackboard while talking science), the world of the progressively more distant future as it is transformed by computer technology, biotechnology, and human evolution. He also describes a hell of a party in Berkeley. Popular science writing will never be the same. At the publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied.
"Juicy Ghosts" is a fast-paced adventure novel, with startling science, engaging dialog-and a happy ending. The novel treats near-future versions of telepathy and immortality. It's also a redemptive political tale, reacting to the chaos of the 2020 US presidential election. The tone is hip, bright, and darkly comic, with generous helpings of Rucker's SF surrealism. Romances interweave the tale.
Essays, conversations, and archival investigations explore the paradoxes, limitations, and social ramifications of trans representation within contemporary culture. The increasing representation of trans identity throughout art and popular culture in recent years has been nothing if not paradoxical. Trans visibility is touted as a sign of a liberal society, but it has coincided with a political moment marked both by heightened violence against trans people (especially trans women of color) and by the suppression of trans rights under civil law. Trap Door grapples with these contradictions. The essays, conversations, and dossiers gathered here delve into themes as wide-ranging yet interconnected as beauty, performativity, activism, and police brutality. Collectively, they attest to how trans people are frequently offered “doors”—entrances to visibility and recognition—that are actually “traps,” accommodating trans bodies and communities only insofar as they cooperate with dominant norms. The volume speculates about a third term, perhaps uniquely suited for our time: the trapdoor, neither entrance nor exit, but a secret passageway leading elsewhere. Trap Door begins a conversation that extends through and beyond trans culture, showing how these issues have relevance for anyone invested in the ethics of visual culture. Contributors Lexi Adsit, Sara Ahmed, Nicole Archer, Kai Lumumba Barrow, Johanna Burton, micha cárdenas, Mel Y. Chen, Grace Dunham, Treva Ellison, Sydney Freeland, Che Gossett, Reina Gossett, Stamatina Gregory, Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, Robert Hamblin, Eva Hayward, Juliana Huxtable, Yve Laris Cohen, Abram J. Lewis, Heather Love, Park McArthur, CeCe McDonald, Toshio Meronek, Fred Moten, Tavia Nyong'o, Morgan M. Page, Roy Pérez, Dean Spade, Eric A. Stanley, Jeannine Tang, Wu Tsang, Jeanne Vaccaro, Chris E. Vargas, Geo Wyeth, Kalaniopua Young, Constantina Zavitsanos
