Queer & Trans Ecopoetics in Crip Dimensions: Writing, Movement & Video — Gray Area Festival 2025 Workshop

How do we make art during multiple polycrises? This workshop invites participants to think through the intersections of gender, sexuality, ability, and ecology through play and creative interdisciplinary inquiry. Participants will be guided through embodied movement, writing exercises, and will work together to make a one-minute video. Please wear clothing that you can move freely in, and bring something to write and film with (like a smartphone).

This workshop is part of Gray Area Festival 2025.

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Course Logistics

Dates: Sunday, September 14, 2025

Times: 12:00 – 3:00PM PT

Cost: $40

Format
In-Person Workshop at Gray Area

Address
2665 Mission St, San Francisco

Experience Level: No prior knowledge or experience needed!

Requirements:
Students will need a smartphone with a camera, or a camera

Additional Information:
• No Refunds or Exchanges.
• View our FAQ here.
• Contact [email protected] with any questions.

Workshop Outline

Introductions and access needs
Start with Authentic Movement in pairs
Screen Oceanic: Queering the Ocean
discussion with a guiding quotation
10 minute break
remote writing exercise
With a phrase from each freewrite, turn it into movement, share with each other
Make into 1 minute films
Show and offer feedback (30 m)
Closing

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Gray Area Festival 2025 Workshops

How To Become An Octopus (And Sometimes Squid)
with Miriam Simun

Sunday, September 14 | 12:00 – 1:30 PM

What might we learn by thinking, sensing, and moving like an cephalopod? In this embodied, experimental workshop, artist Miriam Simun invites participants to leave behind the habits of upright human life and explore the world from the perspective of the soft-bodied, many-armed cephalopod. A guided session in collective transformation, adaptation, and sensory experimentation. We train cephalopod sensitivities and capacities through psycho-physical exercises that help us to enact new ways of being with ourselves, with each other, and with and in the world.

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MicroMovement: Interacting with Hardware
with Leia Chang

Sunday, September 14 | 4:00 – 7:00 PM

This workshop will introduce you to the basics of microcontrollers and have you building tools to translate your movement into electronic expression. Have you ever wanted to make something that reacts to you? Want to learn the building blocks for wearable hardware? Students will be introduced to the basics of CircuitPython and learn to program an Adafruit Qt Py, accelerometer, and Neopixel LEDs. We’ll explore hardware in an accessible and approachable way, using these boards to build out a basic interactive piece that you can visualize your movement with.

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Prosthetic Pixels: Worldbuilding with AI, Style, and Self
with Dalena Tran and Hirad Sab

Sunday, September 14 | 4:00 – 6:00 PM

In this collaborative 2-hour workshop, participants will use Fuser, a creative AI tool for multimodal generation, to design speculative futures through style training (LoRA), image and video generation, and lore co-creation. Participants will form teams and receive a unique world constraint prompt (e.g. “a world where memory is traded as currency” or “where bodies must be upgraded weekly”).

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Instructor(s)

micha cárdenas

micha cárdenas, PhD, MFA, is an artist, author and Associate Professor of Critical Race & Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the director of the Critical Realities Studio. Her debut novel Atoms Never Touch (AK Press 2023) imagines trans latina love crossing multiple quantum realities. Her academic monograph Poetic Operations : Trans of Color Art in Digital Media (Duke UP 2022) was the co-winner of the Gloria Anzaldúa Book Prize in 2022 from the National Women’s Studies Association.

cárdenas is an artist/theorist who was the winner of the 2020 Impact Award at the Indiecade Festival and the 2016 Creative Award from the Gender Justice League. She is a member of the artist collective Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0.

cárdenas’ solo and collaborative artworks have been presented in museums, galleries, and biennials including the SUR Biennial (2023), Outfest Fusion (2023), Tangled Arts + Disability in Toronto (2022), Transmediale in Berlin (2021), the alt_cph Copenhagen Biennial (2020); the Stamps Gallery (2020) in Ann Arbor and the Thessaloniki Biennial (2019) in Greece.

M. Ty

M. Ty is an ember of a diaspora. They're also an Assistant Professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Cynthia Ling Lee

Cynthia Ling Lee is a Taiwanese American interdisciplinary artist who creates embodied art rooted in crip, queer, and feminist of color praxis. She is curious about long-hauling as an alternate embodied training that contradicts dance's ableism, the anti-capitalist wisdom of mosses, the delicate strength of crip care webs, and embodied art that departs from “the show must go on” urgency of theatrical production. Their work has been presented internationally at venues including Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art (New York), REDCAT (Los Angeles), Kuandu Arts Festival (Taipei), and Chandra-Mandapa: Spaces (Chennai). Cynthia is an associate professor of Performance, Play and Design at UC Santa Cruz.