Augmented Senses

Augmented and virtual reality have become commonplace. The Augmented Senses: Feminist Queer Augmented/Virtual Reality virtual symposium highlights experimental and creative approaches to enhanced immersive experiences. Focusing on gender, trans, and feminist themes around the body, desire, biological art, and our microbial environment, three contemporary artists will present their work: micha cárdenas, Eva Davidova, and Amy M. Youngs. 

micha cárdenas, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Art & Design: Games + Playable Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she directs the Critical Realities Studio. Cárdenas is writing a new algorithm for gender, race, and technology. Her book Poetic Operations, Duke University Press, proposes algorithmic analysis to develop a trans of color poetics. Her artwork has been described as “a seminal milestone for artistic engagement in VR” by the Spike art journal in Berlin. She is first-generation Colombian American. Her articles have been published in Transgender Studies Quarterly, GLQ: Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, AI & Society, Scholar & Feminist Online, the Ada Journal of Gender, New Media and Technology, among others. 

Eva Davidova is an interdisciplinary artist with focus on new media(s), information, and their socio-political implications. The issues of her work—ecological disaster, interdependence, and manipulation of information emerge as paradoxes rather than assumptions, in an almost fairy-tale fashion. Davidova has exhibited at the Bronx Museum, the UVP at Everson Museum, the Albright Knox Museum, MACBA Barcelona, CAAC Sevilla, Instituto Cervantes Sofia, La Regenta, and Circulo de Bellas Artes Madrid among others. Her most recent exhibitions are Global Mode at ISSUE Project Room (online), The Sound of One Computer Thinking at the IMPAKT festival (Utrecht, Netherlands) and Intentions>Transfer and Disappearance II, or: Who Owns Our Emotions? at the EdgeCut series. She was a fellow of Residency Unlimited, Harvestworks TIP program, Alfred IEA, and is currently a member of NEW INC, the New Museum Incubator.

Amy M. Youngs creates biological art, interactive sculptures, and digital media works that explore interdependencies between technology, plants, and animals. Her practice-based research involves entanglements with the non-human, constructing ecosystems, and seeing through the eyes of machines. She has created installations that amplify the sounds and movements of living worms, indoor ecosystems that grow edible plants, a multi-channel interactive video sculpture for a science museum, and community-based, participatory video, social media, and public webcam projects.

This symposium will be available both as a livestream and on Zoom for those who wish to be more participatory. Register and we will send you all the info when it is available.