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, gendered violence, racism and colonialism, using algorithmic and intersectional methods.
Director
micha cárdenas, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Art & Design: Games + Playable Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. cárdenas is writing a new algorithm for gender, race and technology. Her book in progress, Poetic Operations, proposes algorithmic analysis as a method for developing a trans of color poetics. cárdenas’s co-authored books The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities (2012) and Trans Desire / Affective Cyborgs (2010) were published by Atropos Press. Her artwork has been described as “a seminal milestone for artistic engagement in VR” by the Spike art journal in Berlin. She is a first generation Colombian American.
cárdenas is an artist/theorist who was the winner of the 2016 Creative Award from the Gender Justice League. She was the recipient of the inaugural James Tiptree Jr. fellowship in 2014, a fellowship to provide support and recognition for the new voices in science fiction who are making visible the forces that are changing our view of gender today. She has been described as one of “7 bio-artists who are transforming the fabric of life itself” by io9.com.
Associates and Researchers
Faculty Associates
Marcelo Viana Neto is a multi-disciplinary artist working in game design, graphic design, 3D art, and critical pedagogy. He was born in the state of Minas Gerais in Brazil and has been a resident of California since 2002. Marcelo holds a BFA in Graphic Design with high distinction from the California College of the Arts and an MFA in Digital Arts and New Media from UC Santa Cruz where he currently works a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Art and Design: Games and Playable Media program.
Jerry Zee – “I am an anthropologist of environment and politics. I explore embroilments of land and air as openings into political experiment. My research tracks the substantial dynamics of sand, dust, and wind as a way of gaining insight to contemporary environmental politics in China and downwind.”
Graduate Researchers
In her current work with the Critical Realities Studio, Allyson Makuch’s art/theory research project, “Memory Matters” collaborates with a fiber arts-based practice, including spinning, weaving, and plant-based dyeing, to explore the material and metaphysical relations between memory, the body, and the environment. As a fifth-generation oil painter, craftswoman, and survivor, her work particularly examines the role of material art practices in healing within the context of trauma, white settler colonialism and the current ecological crisis. In 2020 Makuch received the inaugural Porter Prize in Interdisciplinary Aesthetics for her oil painting and writing series “Domestic Works” and has received other honors such as the Bonfire Design Awards for Overall Best Design and Best Socially Driven Design in 2019. Allyson Makuch is currently a MA student in Environmental Studies at UCSC as a Eugene Cota-Robles fellow and she holds a BA in Sustainable Agriculture and Education from Sterling College, VT.
Zia Puig is a Feminist Studies doctoral student at UC Santa Cruz, where they also work as the Program Coordinator at the Disability Resource Center, and as a researcher-artist for the Critical Realities Studio. Krizia’s work explores issues related to affective robotics and space exploration, focusing on the study of future Mars settlements through frameworks that include feminist & crip technoscience, critical race & ethnic studies, and astronomy & astrophysics.
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.
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 is currently a PhD student in Film and Digital Media with a designated emphasis in Feminist Studies at University of California at Santa Cruz.
Former Associates and Researchers
Clara Qin, Environmental Studies, UCSC
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