AFTER LIFE: micha cárdenas

micha cárdenas

b. 1977, Miami, Florida
Lives and works in Santa Cruz, California

Sin Sol / No Sun, 2020

Augmented reality video game

Game designer, Writer, and Director: micha cárdenas
3-D modeling: Marcelo Viana Neto, Adrian Phillips and Kara Stone
Environments: Abraham Avnisan
Soundtrack: Wynne Greenwood and micha cárdenas
Character Designer: Morgan Thomas
Producer and Installation Video: Dorothy Santos

Courtesy the artist

Sin Sol / No Sun is an augmented reality game that allows users to experience the feelings of a climate change event and deeply consider how climate change disproportionately affects immigrants, trans people, and disabled people. Players can find, see, and hear a story told through poetry about living through climate change induced wildfires from a trans latinx AI hologram named Aura. Set fifty years in the future, Aura tells the story of environmental collapse from the past, which is our present in 2020.

Watch the videos of Sin Sol / No Sun and click here to download and play the game →

This artwork is viewable in-person at YBCA at night across from the Blue Shield of California Theater.

(left) Super Futures Haunt Qollective, Super Furs for the Super Futures, 2120 and (right) micha cárdenas, Sin Sol / No Sun, 2020, installation view, AFTER LIFE (we survive), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2020. Photograph by Artland.

micha cárdenas

micha cárdenas, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Art & Design: Games + Playable Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. micha cárdenas is writing a new algorithm for gender, race and technology, and her artwork has been described as “a seminal milestone for artistic engagement in VR” by the Spike art journal in Berlin. cárdenas’s co-authored books The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities (2012) and Trans Desire / Affective Cyborgs (2010) were published by Atropos Press.

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