Santa Cruz, California
Augmented Reality, Dance Film

Oceanic shifts attention from the damage climate change is causing to the life-worlds on land to the unfolding harm of the oceans. The project uses augmented reality (AR) to visualize landscapes and aquatic species threatened by climate change, stitching the line from colonization to neoliberalism to racial capitalism through holographic dance performances captured with volumetric video, alongside 3-D LIDAR scans of ecotonal coastal environments. Audiences experience the coast of the Pacific Ocean at Natural Bridges State Beach, with an original soundtrack and a series of performances that tell the story of how climate change is a racial justice issue. Dance performances by Cynthia Ling Lee, Gerald Casel, and micha cárdenas, in collaboration with Susana Ruiz, will be used to create the volumetric video for this AR art game. Oceanic will also present words from chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldúa, who wrote about Natural Bridges to think through solidarity across identities in women of color feminism, including the former exclusion of trans women.

micha cárdenas, PhD, is an artist/theorist who combines performance and digital media, and directs the Critical Realities Studio, a studio/lab using XR to engage in the world’s most critical issues. Susana Ruiz, PhD, is an artist and scholar whose creative and scholarly work is broadly concerned with the intersections of art practice, playful design, and digital storytelling with social activism. Choreographer and scholar, Cynthia Ling Lee instigates postcolonial, queer, and feminist-of-color interventions in the field of experimental performance. Gerald Casel’s choreographic research complicates and provokes questions surrounding colonialism, collective cultural amnesia, whiteness and privilege.