Hello all, <div><br></div><div>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<div>
<br></div><div><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Transreal-Political-Aesthetics-Crossing-Realities/dp/0983915245/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1330123176&sr=8-1">http://www.amazon.com/Transreal-Political-Aesthetics-Crossing-Realities/dp/0983915245/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1330123176&sr=8-1</a></div>
<div><br></div><div><br></div><div><div>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. </div>
<div><br></div><div>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.</div>
<div><br></div><div>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.</div>
<div><br></div><div>“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.” </div>
<div><br></div><div>Diana Taylor, University Professor, Performance Studies and Spanish, New York University</div><div>Founding Director, Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics</div><div><br></div><div>“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.”</div>
<div><br></div><div>Jordan Crandall, Associate Professor, Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego</div><div><br></div><div>“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.”</div>
<div><br></div><div>Susan Stryker, transgender theorist, filmmaker, and academic</div><div>Director, Institute for LGBT Studies, Associate Professor, </div><div>Gender and Women's Studies, University of Arizona</div><div>
<br></div><div><br></div>-- <br>micha cárdenas<br>PhD Student, Media Arts and Practice, University of Southern California<br>Provost Fellow, University of Southern California<br><br>MFA, Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego<br>
MA, Communication, European Graduate School<br><br>Co-Author, Trans Desire / Affective Cyborgs, Atropos Press, <a href="http://is.gd/daO00" target="_blank">http://is.gd/daO00</a><br><br>HASTAC Scholar, <a href="http://hastac.org" target="_blank">http://hastac.org/blogs/michacardenas</a><br>
<br>blog: <a href="http://transreal.org" target="_blank">http://transreal.org</a><br><br><br><br>
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