Poetic Operations: Trans of Color Art in Digital Media

by Micha Cárdenas

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-non-conforming 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.

Genres: LGBT, Transgender, Poetry, Art, Queer, Nonfiction, Theory

240 pages, Hardcover

Published March 25, 2022

Reviews

[Alessia Cozza]

book for class #3 - good beginner book to get into this area of study / good introduction of new vocabulary but some parts lost me

[Sarah Cavar · Rating 5 out of 5]

cárdenas does it again with this beautifully-written text, as much performance-poem as set of instructions for a trans-of-color approach to creative-scholarship. Examining verbs like "cut" and "stitch" in relation to worldmaking at the very edges of social legibility (and often at the edges of life itself) Poetic Operations continues the work cárdenas began in "The Transreal."

She guides us through transreal relationalities, intimacies, and practices of transgressive joy, using as a guide a kind of reimagined "algorithm." These are different from the oppressively "rational" algorithms that often appear in STS critiques, and are instead tools that marginalized people have long used, and continue to use, to pass through and break from everyday life. Computing, for cárdenas, is a fundamentally creative and poetic process, and Poetic Operations does incredible justice to this argument in the face of a trans studies dominated by academic prose by white scholars.