Some notes from micha cárdenas’ Becoming Dragon Redux as part of the second evening of Vector Fest 2018: Born Digital, Inner Workings (918 Bathurst) with performances by cárdenas as well as Adam Basanta and Afaq Ahmed Karadia + Adam Tindale. I understand the premise: to explore the inner workings of bodies human and mechanical, a turning inward. Basanta’s piece made Sigur Rós-type music out of tuned microhone feedback. Karadia and Tindale’s Wii Kinect and other sensor-based work left me thinking about the differences between machine-inspired dance and conducting an orchestra of handmade instruments. Still, a close reading of bodies is a very large and ungainly umbrella under which to put these two more medium-specific dudely electronic audio works with cárdenas’ introspective poetic transmissions from her changing body on Estradiol as a dragon in Second Life. It is hard to find deep connective tissue, the through-line skims the technological surface.
Her orange eye smoulders
There’s fire in it
A signal, a portal
Inside and leaking out
Liminal is a threshold, a door. It is a transition between: on or to either side of a boundary. A heterotopia is a liminal space, a place that is absolutely real and unreal at the same time.
On a darkening hilltop the dragon Azdel Slade’s wings are beating, casting dark shapes on the ground. (Is it possible to write about a dragon without writing bad fantasy?) The noise phases in and out of sounding like a heartbeat, a drum without a kickback: thump thump thump. The virtual form of the art gallery and production studio InterAccess hovers with arms outstretched in the dragon’s shadow. I think this might be how all people in Second Life move, a modified Superman. In this sunsetting, the pose seems exaggeratedly holy. InterAccess wears a green bomber jacket and jeans. She is white, her hair is long and brown. She toggles, in and out of body experience. She is also our cameraperson, our viewpoint on the performance. The shuddering roll between first and third person. This is a 10-year-later restaging of cárdenas’ project Becoming Dragon, a 365-hour durational performance where she questioned the year-long “real-life experience” required to receive gender confirmation surgery. She chose to experiment with a hypothetical requirement for ‘species reassignment’ – time spent in a digital body, selecting to become a dragon: an identity beyond binary gender categories.
The cyborg hybrid: a real/unreal body in a place that is absolutely real and unreal at the same time. Though cárdenas is a virtual dragon, in between roars of flame she speaks of the very real physical transition of her own body. Through Adzel Slade, cárdenas performs two poems written during her own hormone replacement therapy. She speaks of the immediate difference in the first few days, her heightened awareness of her changing self, the liminal space between names and genders. About the virtual reality of being on drugs. She notes the dozens of tiny microtransitions that all of us make in the trajectories of our lives. Are any of us solid states?
Even her words come in waves.
Potentially through the glitchy internet connection of 918 Bathurst or possibly even the cameraperson InterAccess’ proximity to cárdenas-as-Adzel, her voice fades and raises and in moments cuts out altogether. This project is an interesting study in what it means to re-stage a digital project ten years later. (You can tell Second Life launched in 2003, reminding us of the time-context even of liminal digital spaces. It has a reputation now for mostly being populated by researchers and artists. When she flies off around the corner of a mountain at the end of the performance, it is with the staggered square flight of digital beings of a different era.) Still, this tenuous connection (however unintentional) brings us into the in-between with her. We catch stray phrases, making liquid sense from uncertain fragments. Occasionally, the camera dips under the surface of the water and the world refracts and grows abstract.
What does it mean to sit with uncertainty, with transition, with partial understanding? As part of her 2014 project at SBC, A Problem So Big It Needs Other People, Curator cheyanne turions provisionally defined sovereignty as “an oscillation between different ways of knowing; the recognition of other understandings as they rub up against one’s own; the act of holding a space for not-knowing.”[1] Maybe it is this space that cárdenas is speaking from. Early in the performance, she talks about the first days on Estradiol, not being confident about anything, and the converse and simultaneous scariness of being a trans person admitting any doubt. In medium and content, she holds this space for us as well. We join her in the in-between.
To be liminal is to be suspended in the strength of the in-between. So often, a pressure for resolution, to be either one thing or another. This explores the richness of not-knowing instead, held within the threshold.
[1] cheyanne turions, “A Problem So Big It Needs Other People.” (Montreal: SBC, 2014).