Trans Ecologies of Resistance in Digital (after)Lives: micha cárdenas’ Sin Sol/No Sun

Abstract

This essay analyzes micha cárdenas’s Sin Sol/No Sun, an augmented reality game that calls attention to gendered and racialized violence, environmental destruction, and colonial violence. It surveys the role that feminist, trans, and queer artists and theorists have occupied in the domain of digital technologies and how utopian post-identitarian approaches within cyberculture led to digital materialist perspectives, thus recentering their discourses on the relationship between the body and the hardware. From there, it explores how cárdenas’s “transreal aesthetics,” informed by trans embodiments and Black feminist practice, draws attention to multi-dimensional ecologies (virtual and physical) while raising pressing issues around marginalized identities and the environment. The essay concludes with an analysis of how cárdenas’s avatars guide players through processes of collective grief in order to unmake the space-time categories imposed by Western colonial capitalism and speculate (or “afro-fabulate”) the possibilities of new worlds.