For the survival of all our ecologies, we must refuse human centricity and build networks of care across lines of species and liveliness. This talk stitches a line from trans people to an expanded conception of trans, using a focus on trans ecological poetics to go beyond a focus on the human. I broaden the operation of “trans” in trans media studies to include non-human movements, such as those made by animals, viruses, and movements across the boundaries between different environments. Trans media studies can extend the fields of media studies, transgender studies, and trans of color studies to connect more deeply to and through non-human entities. Still, any injunction for queer and trans studies to go beyond the human must reconcile with the history of trans, Palestinian, Black, and Indigenous people being deemed less than human. In this talk, I use the method of algorithmic analysis proposed in my book Poetic Operations: Trans of Color Art in Digital Media (Duke UP, 2022) to explore the operations that make up the poetics of three contemporary artworks—Sin Sol (2020), an augmented reality installation I created with the Critical Realities Studio, Acoustic Ocean (2018), a short film by Ursula Biemann and “Of Whales”, a film created using virtual realitry created by Wu Tsang.

micha cárdenas, PhD, MFA, is an artist, author and Professor of Critical Race & Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the director of the Critical Realities Studio. Her debut novel Atoms Never Touch (AK Press 2023) imagines trans latina love crossing multiple quantum realities. Her academic monograph Poetic Operations : Trans of Color Art in Digital Media (Duke UP 2022) was the co-winner of the Gloria Anzaldúa Book Prize in 2022 from the National Women’s Studies Association “for groundbreaking monographs in women’s studies that makes significant multicultural feminist contributions to women of color/transnational scholarship”. cárdenas was a winner of the 2022 Anonymous Was a Woman artist award. She is currently working on her next academic monograph After Man: Trans Ecologies and Climate Justice, as well as The Probability Engine, a multi-disciplinary artwork imagining futures of climate justice. She is a first generation Colombian American.

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