SanDiegoReader.com – By Ernie Grimm
I’m sitting on a leather couch in the middle of a darkened black-walled, black-ceilinged room talking to a man who, at taxpayer expense, takes hormones to become more like a woman yet is in the middle of an experimental performance in which he seeks to become a dragon.
Micha Cárdenas, the 31-year-old man/woman/ dragon in question, sits in a chair three feet from the couch. He’s facing me, but I can’t see his eyes due to the stereoscopic headset he’s wearing as part of a performance art project called Becoming Dragon. The headset limits Cárdenas’s view – except for peripheral vision – to the online world of Second Life, where he’s spent every waking moment of the past 11 days living as a dragon named Azdel Slade.