Upcoming Exhibitions:
October 5-14, 2024: The Probability Engine: Atlantic Overturning, at Nuit Blanche in Toronto, ON
The Critical Realities Studio is a hybrid studio/lab for critical theory and art practice at the University of California, Santa Cruz, supported by the UCSC Arts Division. Our studio engages multiple realities in art, including augmented reality and alternate reality games, as well as other forms of art practice, to engage with the most pressing issues the world faces, including climate change, gender violence, racism and colonialism, using algorithmic and intersectional methods.
Director
micha cárdenas, Ph.D, MFA, is an artist, and Associate Professor of Critical Race & Ethnic Studies and Performance, Play & Design, at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she directs the Critical Realities Studio. Her debut novel Atoms Never Touch (forthcoming October AK Press 2023) imagines trans latina love crossing multiple quantum realities. Her academic monograph Poetic Operations (Duke UP 2022) proposes algorithmic analysis as a method for developing a trans of color poetics. Poetic Operations won 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 tentatively titled After Man: Fires, Oceans and Androids, as well as The Probability Engine, a multi-disciplinary artwork imagining futures of climate justice. She is a first generation Colombian American.
Studio Manager
Star Hagen-Esquerra (they/them) is a multidimensional artist in the realms of game design, interactive entertainment/media, fine arts, puppetry, animation, storytelling, props, and visual effects. Their art centers on upholding traditional storytelling with an emphasis on surreal fantasy and horror as modes of exploring our reality. Through juxtaposing the creation and irony of monsters and horrors of the modern human, they explore themes like the role of the queer indigenous body under colonialism and undoing genocide through reclamation of power.
Associates and Researchers
Faculty Associates
Choreographer and scholar, Cynthia Ling Lee instigates postcolonial, queer, and feminist-of-color interventions in the field of experimental performance. Trained in US postmodern dance and North Indian classical kathak, she is committed to intimate collaborative relationships, ethical intercultural exchange, and foregrounding marginalized voices and aesthetics. Cynthia’s interdisciplinary performance work has been presented at venues such as Dance Theater Workshop (New York), REDCAT (Los Angeles), East West Players (Los Angeles), SZENE Salzburg (Salzburg), Indonesian Dance Festival (Jakarta), Kuandu Arts Festival (Taipei), IGNITE! Festival of Contemporary Dance (New Delhi), and Chandra-Mandapa: Spaces (Chennai).
Susana Ruiz, Ph.D. (pronouns she and/or they) is an artist and scholar whose work is concerned with how the intersection of art practice, playful design, and computational storytelling can enable new approaches to social justice theory and activism, visual aesthetics, and public pedagogy. Her work is collaborative, interdisciplinary, and takes the hybrid form of intertwined theory and practice. The cinematic and the playful drive their practice and the humanistic and the collaborative drive their process.
Anna Friz is a radio, sound and media artist, who creates broadcasts, installations, short films, and live performances. Her curiousities continually return to themes of transmission ecologies and the intimacies of signal space, environment and land, infrastructures, time perception and durational performance, and critical fictions. Since 1998, she has created radiophonic works internationally in which radio is often the source, subject, and medium of the work; she also composes for theater, dance, film, and public practice performance. Anna is currently Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media at University of California, Santa Cruz.
External Collaborators
Marcelo Díaz Viana Neto (he/him) is a multi-disciplinary artist and educator working in game design, graphic design, 3D art, and critical pedagogy based in Brooklyn, NY. He is an Assistant Professor of Game Design at CUNY Hostos Community College. His research focuses on applying modes of organization based on solidarity and mutual aid to pedagogy and design practice.
Ian Costello is a Digital Arts and New Media, Experimental Play MFA graduate from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and received a BFA from Parsons School of Design. His current work focuses on the role of ecology in games and interactive media, and visually communicating coastal flooding risks using game engines, in collaboration with UCSC’s Center for Coastal Climate Resilience.
Anny Mogollón is a first-generation Ph.D. candidate in the Literature department with a designated emphasis in both CRES and Feminist Studies. She immigrated from Peru with her parents at a young age and was raised in Southern California along with her three siblings. At UCSC, Anny’s primary research is on the cultural archive of domestic worker representation in the United States, but also includes an interest in digital activism, public humanities, U.S. ethnic literatures, pedagogy, and trauma studies. She has worked with the California Domestic Workers Coalition, a coalition of labor organizations, organizers, and allies. Their work and commitment to changing how domestic workers are treated in the United States inspire Anny. Her creative pieces include poetry and mixed media.
Former Associates and Researchers
Tamara Duplantis (she/her) is a Louisiana-born digital media artist, experimental composer, and arts educator. Her practice focuses on reclaiming outdated and neglected forms of technology as new interfaces for musical play, and creating works that express queer Louisianan identity in a time of climate catastrophe. Her experimental music performance games have been featured at Indiecade Festival (LA & Paris), Different Games (NYC), Babycastles (NYC), Playtopia (Cape Town), the Dublin Fringe Festival, and the New York City Electronic Music Festival; she has given talks at GDC (SF), GameSoundCon (LA), Pixelpop (St. Louis), and Arkansas Indie Festival (Magnolia). She received her MFA in Electronic Music & Recording Media from Mills College, and has taught at University of California, Santa Cruz and Mills at Northeastern University.
Dorothy Santos is a Filipina American writer, curator, and researcher whose academic interests include digital art, computational media, and biotechnology. Born and raised in San Francisco, California, she holds Bachelor’s degrees in Philosophy and Psychology from the University of San Francisco and received her Master’s degree in Visual and Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts. She is currently a Ph.D. student in Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz as a Eugene V. Cota-Robles fellow. Her work appears in art21, Art Practical, Rhizome, Hyperallergic, Ars Technica, Vice Motherboard, and SF MOMA’s Open Space. Her essay “Materiality to Machines: Manufacturing the Organic and Hypotheses for Future Imaginings,” was published in The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture. She serves as a co-curator for REFRESH, a curatorial collective in partnership with Eyebeam, the program manager for the Processing Foundation, and host for the podcast PRNT SCRN produced by Art Practical.
Angie Fan – MFA student artist
Nicki Duval – MFA student artist
Patrick Stephenson (DANM ‘23, Experimental Play) makes work marking queer memory and experience in physical space through projection mapping and interactive site-specific installations. As a collaborative researcher for this studio, Patrick brought his multidisciplinary approach to AR space, and worked to explore the possibilities of creative 3D data capture.
Gabrielle Serna [she/they] is a Mexican, lesbian artist and game designer from Texas. She is a 2D and 3D artist who creates nostalgic, and introspective games about identity and inclusion, and works to center the experiences of queer and trans people of color through her work. Gabrielle received an undergraduate degree from the University of California, Santa Cruz, studying Art & Design: Games & Playable Media.
Annalivia Martin Straw – Concept Artist
Caitlin Morgan – Concept Artist
Gerald Casel’s choreographic research complicates and provokes questions surrounding colonialism, collective cultural amnesia, whiteness and privilege, and the tensions between the invisible/perceived/obvious structures of power. To this end, Casel has led a community engagement program called Dancing Around Race, activating the community through candid discussions around racial equity. GERALDCASELDANCE creates and presents dances that ask questions about human beings – who they are, what they do and how their actions affect the world in which they live. Each dance provokes reflection and implants its imagery into the viewer’s psyche by combining movement and spatial composition with metaphor. Dropping hints of narrative while inviting space for contemplation, the dances deliver multiple levels of interpretation and meaning.
Mohamadreza Babaee, Ph.D, is an Iranian performance and digital media studies scholar and interdisciplinary artist. His main areas of research include Middle East studies, Iran Studies, Migration, Critical Race Theory, and Surveillance Studies. He frequently presents at performance studies conferences and contributes articles and book reviews to academic journals. His art practice ranges from collaborating with professional Middle Eastern American theatre companies to producing digital and board games that examine identity politics in diasporic contexts. Mohamadreza holds a Ph.D. in Theatre and received an MFA in Digital Arts and New Media at UCSC.
Kara Stone is an artist and scholar interested in the affective and gendered experiences of psychosocial disability, debility, and healing as it relates to art production, particularly videogames. Her artwork has been featured in The Atlantic, Wired, and Vice. She is a member of the Different Games Collective. She holds a BFA in Film Production and master’s degree in Communication and Culture from York University, and received a PhD in Film and Digital Media with a designated emphasis in Feminist Studies at University of California at Santa Cruz.
Assistant Professor Jerry Zee is jointly appointed in the Department Anthropology and the Princeton Environmental Institute. Zee is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research explores geophysical and environmental emergence as sites of political experiment. His work is situated at the intersections of feminist science and technology studies, environmental humanities, and experimental ethnography. He considers the rise of China as a matter of geophysical and geopolitical entanglement, moving across weather systems that connect inland land degradation, major dust storm formation, and the eventual scattering of Chinese land as meteorological fallout across the Northern Hemisphere. He comes to Princeton after having served as assistant professor in Anthropology and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at UC Santa Cruz and a Wenner-Gren Foundation Hunt Fellow. He completed his PhD at UC Berkeley’s Anthropology Department and was Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Davis in Anthropology and the Program in Science and Technology Studies.
Clara Qin, Environmental Studies, UCSC
Zia Puig, Feminist Studies at UCSC
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Privacy Policy
The Probability Engine iOS app does not collect or store any user data. We do not collect or save any of your personal data through the Probability Engine iOS app. You will be asked to allow location data, but that is only used by the app for walking navigation in augmented reality. You will be asked for camera access, only to display the virtual objects in your screen in your local environment. No data is sent back to our servers. No data is saved locally on your device or on our servers.