Transcode

The Museum of Transgender Hirstory & Art (MOTHA) and the ongoing exhibition “Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects” was founded as a conceptual art project by artist Chris E. Vargas who performs as its Executive Director. The mission of MOTHA is to ask audiences to think critically about what a visual history of transgender life could and should look like, and if it’s even possible to compile a comprehensive history of an identity category for which the language is fairly new, sometimes contested, and still rapidly evolving. MOTHA’s physical status is “forever under construction” which allows the project to take multiple forms such as exhibitions, poster graphics, performances, and a virtual artist residency program.

- Chris E. Vargas

default filename tv finds and plays youtube videos that were uploaded from the camera without edits to the filename.

(although strict safesearch is on, videos are not screened - please watch with care)

- Everest Pipkin

A video-poem borrowing its title from a line of poetry by Juliana Huxtable. The sequence is constructed from found footage – largely from music videos and art documentaries – where there is a central figure – the artist – being watched by an audience.

- Anaïs Duplan

A video-poem borrowing its title from a line of poetry by Juliana Huxtable. The sequence is constructed from found footage – largely from music videos and art documentaries – where there is a central figure – the artist – being watched by an audience.

- Anaïs Duplan

A video-poem borrowing its title from a line of poetry by Juliana Huxtable. The sequence is constructed from found footage – largely from music videos and art documentaries – where there is a central figure – the artist – being watched by an audience.

- Anaïs Duplan

Redshift and Portalmetal asks: as climate change forces us to travel to the stars and build new homes and families, how do we build on this land, where we are settlers, while working to undo colonization? The story uses space travel as a lens through which to understand the experience of migration and settlement for a trans woman of color. Redshift and Portalmetal tells the story of Roja, who’s planet’s environment is failing, so she has to travel to other worlds. The project takes the form of an online, interactive game, including film, performance and poetry. I designed the interaction, wrote the text, performed the movement, and coordinated the filming in Los Angeles and Toronto. The project is built with HTML5 video, CSS and Javascript, using the Scalar e-publishing platform.

- micha cárdenas

TRANSCODE MANIFESTO

The below is a working version of the Transcode Manifesto. A document I have be generating as a way to address and speak to the larger conceptual and organizational structures reoccurring across my various creative projects. This document is subject to change without notice, the version you read today may not be the version present here tomorrow.

Version_

My body is encoded, coded and recoded always. When my body is projected across the country via the telephone system to talk to a stranger, it is often coded as male by the operator while simultaneously my voice is encoded into a uniform digital system and compressed for its journey. This conversation, to process a payment, centers what is for many the most masculine seeming aspect of my body, in this moment I am transformed removed from the context of my corporeal body I am imagined as male in the mind's eye of the equally disembodied voice on the other end. But it’s not a transformation for the operator as my body has never been anything to them before the call, maybe then it is simply another facet of the multiple ways my body is being processed and my failure to code my body as feminine within every system. I encode, code and recode my body always. My voice goes becomes higher, wavelengths shorten in response, posture changes despite this only being a voice call. I am left wondering if I have just reified the codification of voice as gender. Left to wonder how much is this system changing me and how much I might be able to change it in turn. Left wondering what a radical intervention might be in the face of definitional and categorical violence where the ever increasing drive is to define smaller and smaller aspects of ourselves. To separate, catalog and index. To encode, code, and recode. 

The version of this manifesto that you are reading is the first version, the rough draft, as well as the 3rd or 4th versions whose changes are/were/will be relatively minor or possibly cataclysmic. It is at the same time, the final and most definitive edition. This is because transcode work at its core refuses linear understands of narrative, time, knowledge making, and labor. Instead, transcode work insists upon lingering in the ebb and flow between categories, definitions, and destinations, to see the many iterations and tangents of a work as inseparable from its final product and inscrutable to the logic of cause and effect. How might an ending have affected its own beginning? 

In the formulation “A to B,” transcode invests in the liberatory power of the “to” as a space of movement, possibility, and rupture. 

The prefixal “trans-” of transcode, meaning: across, beyond, through, changing thoroughly. By lingering in the space of the “to” the linear arc can be disrupted as one finds themself able to look not only back at the “A” and forward to “B” but also side to side, upward, downward, inward, and off the path. By seating work in this space, transcode opts out of and interrogates the drive towards linear, binary, and static logic, offering a means of imagining otherwise the categorizations and narratives put forth by these logics onto fluid subjects. 

Transcode examines code as a base material in culture’s generation of meaning and narrative. Code meaning: “a system of signals or symbols for communication,” as well as “a system of principles,” and “instructions for a computer.” Transcode then is an interruption of and traversal between codes. An effort in placing oneself at the site/sight/cite of meaning making, exposing the codes (structures, processes, laws) which undergird supposedly inherent truths (of gender, of ownership, of land).

Transcode is numerously trans, meaning it enacts and explores trans in its, subjects, methods, themes, and forms.

Transcode work, while stemming from an interrogation of transgender issues, seeks to hold space for other and multiple trans identity configurations.

Transcode work is transmaterial, meaning its projects engage a variety of forms which may shift over time.

Transcode work sees and responds to the violences of codes, taxonomies, and categorical systems.

Transcode work is expansive in its understanding of bodies, seeing bodyhood as a gesture of recontextualizing subjects and seeing as conceiving of the body as surpassing the corporeal.​

Transcode work engages systems (computer, numerical, political, and etc.) as a way of critically interrogating oppression and control.

Transcode takes up codes as an artistic material and as a trans methodology. While not only referring to computer code, transcode does view computer code as a material with immense potential in enacting the gesture of trans.

- Chelsea Thompto

As I begin to write this, my newly adopted home of Silicon Valley had its first glimmer of blue sky in a week. Not clear mind you and not healthy to breath, just not quite so orange/brown/grey. I am writing this as I am finishing the virtual installation of the show, Transcode, taking place across two online platforms this month. The first, a more traditional webpage that is part of the artist-run space called Unrequited Leisure out of Nashville, TN and the second a more experimental three-dimensionally navigable space called New Art City based in Oakland, CA. 

While I am so excited that this show can exist in these spaces despite the fact that we are in the throws of a manifold crisis (climate change, racial injustice, COVID-19), I want to resist explicitly the idea that these virtual spaces are removed or separate from these issues. Thus the orange dome over this unrealistic landscape. Rather than reconstruct reliably the architecture of the Unrequited Leisure space or push fully into the impossible made manifest potential of virtual spaces, the layout of this show attempts to rest uncomfortably in between. As the Transcode text states:

“Instead, transcode work insists upon lingering in the ebb and flow between categories, definitions, and destinations...”

What happens when we hold these contexts together, when we don’t allow ourselves to fully step into the virtual, when we insist that even in virtual spaces we do in fact still have bodies. Bodies existing in a time of extreme crisis, bodies breathing smoke filled air through masks designed to protect them from another threat entirely. Perhaps we can start to think about how these crises bleed into one another and into virtual space. Perhaps we can understand the virtual not as an escape but as a prism which distorts and refracts but never fully departs from its context.

- Chelsea Thompto

Unrequited Leisure is an artist-run space in Nashville, Tennessee that focuses on emerging and mid-career artists that explore screen-based approaches to critical and topical investigations. Exhibitions in the gallery are programmed and organized by its members, Chalet Comellas Baker and Clinton Sleeper and the artists presented are selected through a thematic curatorial framework.