Trans Ecologies in Digital Games and Contemporary Art

Abstract

Using Tiffany Lethabo King’s concept of the shoal as a space between Blackness and Indigeneity, this chapter singles out the figure of an ecotone—a space between two kinds of environment—to imagine trans ecologies. I think through this transitional space between environments and bodies in the following examples: my multidisciplinary artwork Sin Sol (2018), Ursula Biemann’s video installation Acoustic Ocean (2018), Porpentine Charity Heartscape’s Twine game With Those We Love Alive (2017), and Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s game I CANT REMEMBER A TIME I DIDNT NEED YOU (2021). In these examples, one sees trans, Indigenous, and Black bodies and identities extended beyond the bounds of the skin, by way of augmented reality, hormones, ontologies, and ethical systems of multispecies interdependence.