Body, Space, and Gender in the Mixed Reality Environment of Becoming Dragon (Micha Cárdenas, 2008) – A Performance in Second Life

Body, Space, and Gender in the Mixed Reality Environment of Becoming Dragon (Micha Cárdenas, 2008) – A Performance in Second Life

In this essay, Agáta Hošnova explores the environment of mixed realities as experienced by Colombian-American trans-femme artist Micha Cárdenas in her performance Becoming Dragon (2008), which took place in an online and freely accessible virtual world, Second Life; the artist fully immersed for 365 hours during the time when she was undergoing hormone replacement therapy from male to female. In this context, digital worlds epitomise a sort of liminal space between the real world and the ‘artificially created’ online one – it is placed on the edge of the two.