As someone who as a child walked long Englewood blocks with my grandfather, a ride or die Jesse Jackson advocate, going from house to house, petitioning and fundraising, passing out gum, and making balloon animals.

“Because just a dollar or even just your name means you hear what I’m saying”…

Endless petitions, endless treats, endless hope. Piles and piles of picket signs. Over and over again. And yeah that shit stuck. I forgot who said it earlier today on FB, but it struck a chord. It was some version of before we all start with our Jesse Jackson thinkpieces and partial anecdotes, just go ahead and ask yourself what you’ve done and what you really know about the why and when of what things mean…

I tell people that I was born crazy and that there is nothing I am more proud of. Because I got to color picket signs, pass out balloons, roll my eyes because why aren’t we going home yet, and walk with a grandfather who, indeed, was crazy enough to sue the Chicago Police Department all the way up to the Supreme Court for the right for him and me and all y’all to stand on the street, hold your signs, and protest. And we can do this because he won.

Run Jesse Run!

Keep Hope Alive!

I Am Somebody!

who for all her childhood (P.U.S.H.) was originally published in salt.codes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Over at the Immersive Realities Labs, we are thrilled to be working on Material Conditions 01, a digital art exhibit for theWrong Biennale. Curated by Marisa Parham, Andrew W. Smith, and I, the exhibit is the first in a new series of curations powered by salt.codes, our experimental publishing project. Material Conditions 01 asks participants to think about a speculative future through rapid creation, guided by two prompts chosen randomly from an assortment of ideas gathered from community-generated ideas.

The community prompt generator mimics the feeling of drawing a sticky note out of a hat. We seek to invite the spontaneity and serendipity of a freewriting session, a design brainstorm, a creative experiment. What these spaces have in common is a freedom to create, granted by enough structure to anchor us to a starting point. The constraint is what allows creativity to flow in generative, specific, and interesting directions.

We drew inspiration from projects including the Situation Lab’s “Thing from the Future” and Glyph Press’s “Shock: Social Science Fiction.” These projects, as well as others in the worlds of roleplaying games and speculative design, rely on prompts or constraints to work their magic and allow players to think meaningfully about possible futures.

As Marisa, Andrew, and I worked on the structure for our prompt generator, I was reminded of the Futures Wheel, a tool that speculative designers sometimes use to think about how a single change might ripple through a world and lead to surprising consequences. If the Situation Lab and Shock are precedents for the generator, then I imagine the Futures Wheel as the precedent for the artistic process that might unfold from the generated prompt: how to take a set of constraints and infer from them a world, and from that world infer an object, or a character, or a building, or a story, that makes the imagined world sing to an audience.

Artists, writers, and creative practitioners of all kinds are invited to submit their work to Material Conditions 01. The submission guidelines can be found here.

Material Conditions :: Prompting Speculative Creativity was originally published in salt.codes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The newest work is juicy, exciting, and challenges all of our assumptions. I’m so proud to be anywhere in conversation with this work. Y’all stun me.

A link to the slideshow is here (revised of sensitive content for public sharing).

A list of the work shared is here. Happy reading!

Vincent Brown, “Mapping a Slave Revolt Visualizing Spatial History through the Archives of Slavery,” Social Text 33, no. 4 125 (December 1, 2015): 134–41, https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-3315826.

Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760–1: http://revolt.axismaps.com/ (PI: Vincent Brown)

Tao Leigh Goffe, “Unmapping the Caribbean: Toward a Digital Praxis of Archipelagic Sounding,” Archipelagos, no. 5 (2020), http://archipelagosjournal.org/es/issue05/goffe-unmapping.html.

Dark Laboratory: https://www.darklaboratory.com/

Electric Laboratory (a Dark Laboratory x Taller Electric Marronage Crossover Event): https://www.publicbooks.org/electric-laboratory/

Andrew Kahn and Jamelle Bouie, “The Atlantic Slave Trade in Two Minutes,” Slate, June 25, 2015, http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_history_of_american_slavery/2015/06/animated_interactive_of_the_history_of_the_atlantic_slave_trade.html.

Britt Rusert, “New World: The Impact of Digitization on the Study of Slavery,” American Literary History 29, no. 2 (May 1, 2017): 267–86, https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajx003.

Marisa Parham, “Sample | Signal | Strobe: Haunting, Social Media, and Black Digitality,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019, ed. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein, https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled-f2acf72c-a469-49d8-be35-67f9ac1e3a60/section/0fa03a28-d067-40b3-8ab1-b94d46bf00b6.

Marisa Parham, “Breaking, Dancing, Making in the Machine: Notes on .Break .Dance,” Sx Archipelagos, no. 2 (July 10, 2019), https://doi.org/10.7916/archipelagos-xn3y-vj19.

Marisa Parham, .break.dance http://www.smallaxe.net/sxarchipelagos/issue03/parham/parham.html

Abdul Alkhalimat, “The Sankofa Principle: From the Drum to the Digital,” in The Digital Black Atlantic, ed. Roopika Risam and Kelly Baker Josephs (Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2021).

eBlack Studies Manifesto, 2008. https://www.digitalmanifesto.net/manifestos/185/

Roopika Risam and Kelly Baker Josephs, eds., The Digital Black Atlantic (Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2021).

Kim Gallon, “Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, ed. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren Klein (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016).

Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2014).

COVIDBlack: https://www.covidblack.org/homegoing

Catherine Knight Steele, Digital Black Feminism (New York: NYU Press, 2021).

BCat Lab: https://www.disconetwork.org/bcat-lab (PI: Catherine Knight-Steele)

Shaka McGlotten, “Black Data,” in No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies, ed. E. Patrick Johnson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/23/chapter/97539/Black-Data.

Zach Blas: Facial Weaponization Suite: https://zachblas.info/works/facial-weaponization-suite/

Jessica Lynne, “Reading the Numbers of Stop-and-Frisk,” Hyperallergic, September 21, 2015, http://hyperallergic.com/237694/reading-the-numbers-of-stop-and-frisk/.

Mimi Onuoha, An Overview and Exploration of the Concept of Missing Datasets. : MimiOnuoha/Missing-Datasets, 2018, https://github.com/MimiOnuoha/missing-datasets.

Jennifer L. Morgan, Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2021).

Black DH + Black Data was originally published in salt.codes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I recently led a workshop for the Ohio 5 on Anti-Racist and Decolonial Pedagogies. Normally, I’d thread some of the material that inspired that facilitation or that I’m incubating with, but I’m still in Twitter jail.

Still, with the semester beginning, I don’t want anyone to miss out so see below for some of the texts that I return to again and again in my thinking around anti-racist/decolonial DH.

• The 2015 HASTAC Scholars forum on Decolonizing the Digital hosted by micha cárdenas, Noha F. Beydoun and Alainya Kavaloski. here.
• Hogan, Skylee-Storm, and Krista McCracken. “Doing The Work: The Historian’s Place in Indigenization and Decolonization.” Active History (blog), December 12, 2016. here.
• Yomaira C. Figueroa’s “Decoloniality Sandbox.” This was part of the working draft of the Diaspora keyword for the award-winning! Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities, but didn’t make it into the final version for technical reasons on my end. here.
• Always this essay: Parham, Marisa. “Sample | Signal | Strobe: Haunting, Social Media, and Black Digitality.” In Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein. here.
• Gaertner, David, and Melissa Haberl. “Recoding Relations: Dispatches from the Symposium for Indigenous New Media.” In the Moment (blog), January 21, 2020. here.
• Léopold Lambert’s issue (35) of Funambulist, called DECOLONIAL ECOLOGIES. here.
• Clapper, Jordan. “The Ancestors in the Machine: Indigenous Futurity and Indigenizing Games.” In Alternative Historiographies of the Digital Humanities, edited by Dorothy Kim and Adeline Koh, 427–72. Punctum Books, 2021. here.

I also love using William and Ellen Crafts’ escape from Georgia in 1848 as an example of unstructured data and maroon knowledge. I usually reference “Ellen Craft’s Radical Techniques of Subversion” [e-misférica 5, no. 2 (2008)] by Uri McMillan when I do. Here, and a webarchive version here.

Suggest something in the comments; you know I love to read and cite others!

Lagniappe:

For those looking for an introduction to the digital humanities textbook, I added one by Drucker to my resources page that you can download as a PDF and will keep adding resources there as I think of them (and try to rebuild from the deceased dh.jmjafrx.com). There are many “Intro to DH” tools to choose from; I still like the clarity of the definitions in this 2014 edition. here.

Reposted from Kitchen Table History.

Readings on Anti-Racist and Decolonial DH was originally published in salt.codes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

My morning social scroll unexpectedly landed me an opportunity to listen in on a live discussion featuring Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Paul Gilroy. The occasion was the publication of their co-edited volume of Stuart Hall’s writings on race and difference.

Anyone who’s taken a class with me knows that Hall is incredibly important to my own framing of cultural studies inquiry — which is to say that if every social media scroll is a bit like playing slots, then finding an opportunity to listen to brilliant minds ruminate on culture, freedom, and political action adds up to a big morning win!

• •

Starting my day at a talk with Ruth Wilson Gilmore (@rwgilmoregirls) and Paul Gilroy (@bungatuffie), two of my favorite minds and favorite humans.

I’m especially struck by Gilmore’s response to the question, via Stuart Hall’s thinking, of whether the study of culture is a luxury.

Is the study of culture a luxury? Gilmore describes how struggles through, about, and as effects of culture highlight a constant sense of human trying to improve social, political, and economic conditions. “All of that trying,” she notes, “is part of the process.”

For Gilmore, the study of culture is also “the study of consciousness, the study of ideology,” the study of how we live — or as I would gloss, of how we *manage* to live in our inherited worlds. As Gilmore frames it, such study enables us to “see things we wouldn’t otherwise see.”

Culture, for Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “is the purpose of struggle, so that we can lead these lives” of luxury, for the luxury we seek is freedom.

In other words, Gilmore nailed it in the beginning to her response, “Life and death become luxurious, for those of us who fight for it.” Indeed.

Gilmore also identifies important complexities of social media use in relation to social movement. As I’ve noted before, the work of clicking, sharing, etc can produce or move in useful synchrony with other forms of action. Which is to say that I avoid reifying “slacktivism.”

Gilmore is not piling on slacktivism, but she asks us to make important distinctions between what she identifies as “recitation” and “rehearsal.” I find this incredibly useful, especially after her description of some identifiable academic social media dynamics of recitation.

Gilmore’s “recitation” names how the repetition of academic ideas, quotes, and etc can interfere with the hard work of inquiry, as “the intellectual activity of theorizing our way through the conjecture” is reduced to a test of loyalty to a certain set of ideas. Gilmore’s insight begs attentiveness to how acts of recitation can replace ongoing intellectual engagement. She highlights the importance of “working through the ideas,” for instance attending to a writer’s use of “the phrase and what the phrase” asks of us, even as we might struggle and stumble.

This reminds me of something I recently heard Katherine McKittrick (@demonicground) say in a talk in regards to her years-long study of Sylvia Wynter, which I paraphrase here as a reminder that study is hard and slow and *that* is okay because that difficulty is itself important.

I would add, natural human frustrations with frustration aside, that the need for scholarly study to be easier is attached to the academic-capitalist pressures to produce at all costs. We live in the tension between production and the requirements for care that texts set before us.

I hear an argument for active care in Gilmore’s request that we focus on “rehearsal” rather than recitation, the enactment and instantiation of ideas as part of our working-through, “opening out” models as we fight militarism, carceral racism, and environmental destruction.

Gilroy picks this up, I think, in his own distinction between pessimism and fatalism. “It’s sensible to be pessimistic,” but we must also corral resources that keep us from being rendered inert by seeing/witnessing/knowing. “Hashtag pessimism” is not pessimism, it is fatalism.

On that note (!), thanks as always to Gilmore and Gilroy, and via the Spirits of course to Stuart Hall. Thanks also to @SBangstad and the other interlocutors for this event. Also, I know this was Gilmore heavy, but I’ve been especially engaged with her work lately and needed this on a Thursday morn.

Missed the live event? There is indeed a recording! I know that I will be returning to it.

• •

The preceding piece is a thread that was originally live-tweeted on 3/17/2021. It has been lightly modified from the original — mainly to remove Twitter-specific formatting and abbreviation, and to increase citations — but each paragraph is still roughly one tweet. You can view the original here, with an archived PDF here. #citeblackwomen

I should also note that Gilroy has given us a lot to work through with his closing assertion, which asks us to think about the difference between hashtag pessimism and what we already understand as fatalism, which perhaps gets at how and why one might make an affective claim in regard one’s own commitment to political action.

In the past I have thought a lot about this via Noah Berlatsky’s “Hashtag Activism Isn’t a Cop-Out” in The Atlantic, and more recently with Sarah J. Jackson, Moya Bailey, and Brooke Foucault Welles’ book, #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice.

Luxury and liberation was originally published in salt.codes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“Todas las cosas posible, todos los textos posible que recogan este memoria so that our presence — so that we can change the narrative.”

— Mayra Santos-Febres

Digital blackness/Black digitality is a container that can’t be contained. Constellations is a series of interviews, conversations, and testimonies on the wide-ranging ways Black diasporic people and their co-conspirators create, critique, and confront blackness, technology, digital space and its publics, accountability and community.

Digital blackness has no “beginning” and rejecting chronology and Western modes of linear time is part of the work. Abdul Alkalimat, comparing the drum, and Black diasporic technology still in use today, and twenty-first century digital tools, noted “both are code-generating machines made by human beings in many diverse forms, shapes, sizes, and colors; both are usually operated by human hands; and both are the basis for a type of literacy in communicating and performing cultural activities.” Constellations, in other words, isn’t an oral history. It is nothing so staid and regimented. Digital blackness is a “disordered cosmos,” to think with Chanda Prescod-Weinstein. Constellations is a chaotic ride through our star systems.

Chaotic, but still we sail. Without flags and without country. “Our boats are open, and we sail them for everyone.”

Cited:

Mayra Santos-Febres: The Fractal Caribbean https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tFlLkUSr84

Abdul Alkhalimat. “The Sankofa Principle: From the Drum to the Digital.” In The Digital Black Atlantic, edited by Roopika Risam and Kelly Baker Josephs. Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2021.

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein. The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred. New York: Bold Type Books, 2021.

Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation Translated by Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).

Image via MANIOC: Bibliothèque numérique sur la Caraïbe, l’Amazonie, le Plateau des Guyanes

Constellations :: an interview series was originally published in salt.codes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The following is adapted from Twitter flash essay written on 2/28/21. That morning I flicked open Twitter, and this image was the first thing that I saw…

Struck just now by this “Deep Nostalgia” tech, which algorithmically animates photos. My colleague La Marr Bruce (@Afromanticist) has used it with this photo of Frederick Douglass. It is amazing. And also terrifying. My first book was about haunting as praxis in Black lifeworlds, so thoughts …

My book is about memory & loss in African American life, and it ends with a consideration of Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved coupled with James Van Der Zee’s photography in Camille Billops’ Harlem Book of the Dead (a book of Harlem Renaissance era photography that structured my pivot into #BlackDH — shorthand for an academic constelllation known as Black digital humanities).

I’m also thinking now about Tonia Sutherland’s writing on postmortem holograms of Tupac Shakur.

In this case Deep Nostalgia works by mapping an image onto a set of templated movements. The image is algorithmically re-mastered (*shuddersincontext*) around those movements, like any computer-generated animation. Of course much of the terror is generated by the fact that the image is a photograph, so we insert here all the things we know about photographs, truth claims, & where we imagine the line between “reality” and — everything else “real.”

As a technique analog animation asks us to process gaps between material reality and what we imagine. In my .break .dance project, which is an interactive longform essay, I use examples of different kinds of animation to think about the gap between what we know and what we thus imagine we see. Evidence is itself algorithmic — in our daily lives we constantly process, determining what “makes sense” and what cannot be made admissible as reality. I use this flipbook animation to make the point:

from .break .dance:

“…the brain fills the gaps by inserting continuity, a kind of speculation based on reasonable projections regarding an object’s movement across space. It is the work of technology to keep the duration of the gaps below the minimum threshold of perceptibility.”

The Deep Nostalgia technology that Bruce is highlighting forces us to think hard about where we mark or identify those thresholds. It reminds us that we cannot trust what we see, even as we live as people who must know things™ — processing and responding — in order to live.

Nineteenth century spirit photography, by the way, emerged out of the belief that new photographic technologies could force the threshold of perceptibility across dimensions — we could see ghosts — which is less maybe about representation than about technology as an aid to discovery, an aid to what we don’t see.

Similarly, Deep Nostalgia tech is supposed to help us newly “rediscover” people from our past by literally and figuratively reanimating them. Again, in the case of the Frederick Douglass image, we should be reminded of Tonia Sutherland’s work on race and holograms, which amplifies the stakes of profiting from Black people’s deaths by producing robotic facsimiles of the formerly Black living. (Though the image we are looking at was simply produced as an experiment.)

But in a different vein, Harlem Renaissance photographer James Van Der Zee wholly embraced the sense that photos could express a sense of how Black people often also live in active relationship with the dead, a sophisticated boundary-language for lossed ones as presence.

Though the Deep Nostalgia technology that Bruce tweets about feels like a whole ‘nother thing yet again: The image renders are especially striking in how they use actual photographs to try to get around the uncanny valley problem.

Oversimply, “uncanny valley” is the discomfort you feel when a digital render looks enough human to look human, but is also just enough off to signal that it is anything but, which we thus process and feel as terror (yes I’ve written on racial passing, the uncanny, & virtuality).

My guess is that the uncanniness is supposed to be short-circuited by the emotional experience of deep nostalgia itself. We are going to see what we so desperately long to see — our absorption into the simulation that, I guess, we are to experience as a repetition of memory — rather than as something entirely new.

A Deep Nostalgia photo is always new both because it is a machine-generated simulation, and also because of its situation in the present moment of apprehension. It becomes real — successful — when someone says yes that is her. More memory than history.

So we arrive therefore at two problems. (Ok, that is a lie. There are like fifty-gajillion problems with this whole thing. I just mean right now as I’m thinking.)

But let’s talk about two problemss that are easily identified: From what I can tell, the movements onto which the photo is mapped are drawn from a database of possible movements. What does this mean for how our personhood is itself cultural? One reason I’m struggling to write right now is that I can’t stop looking at the image. Like, can’t lie — I love this hot sauce Frederick Douglass (Am I allowed to say that? Am I heading some kind of Black Studies hell?)

At the same time, I am struck by, yes, the sauciness. I’m going to go out on a limb and say there’s something deeply strange in watching a nineteenth century figure “moving for the camera” in a distinctly modern way. The #DouglassSelfie will haunt our dreams. Hashtag Black History month gone awry.

But, more importantly, I’m thinking as usual about Toni Morrison, and the warning around which she structures the ending of Beloved.

In my book, I focus on her use of the photograph that no one should look at for too long, lest “something more familiar than the dear face” appear:

Like how do we choose to have technologies like “Deep Nostalgia” in our lives? How do digital humanities perspectives, namely Black DH, help us think alongside such technologies?

Let me close with an image that I end my book with, and that I still think about all the time — Van Der Zee’s “Future Expectations,” wherein he channels spirit photography and Black dimensionality at its thresholds, but uses it to pivot us toward imagining beautiful futures for ourselves.

For so many Black people, the proper place of nostalgia is situated in the future.

Thank you @Afromanticist for this gift of things to think about on a Sunday morning.

Also LOL at how I spend a lot of time kvetching about how no one seems to understand that digital and live events should also be cited, but here I am with a twitter essay. All I can say is: #CiteBlackWomen.

And, finally, someone asked me for the title of my book, it’s called Haunting and Displacement in African American Literature and Culture (2008). Of course I want you to read it, because it informs almost all of my #BlackDH work, but it’s also currently being converted into a twitter bot, amongst other things, so who knows how and where it might appear next!

The preceding piece is a flash essay that originally appeared on Twitter, written over the course of an hour on 2/28/2021. It has been lightly modified from the original — mainly to remove Twitter-specific formatting and abbreviation, and to increase citations— but each paragraph is still roughly one tweet. You can view the original here, with an archived PDF here.

The “Deep Nostalgia” referenced above is a 2021 technology that had been recently introduced by an ancestry research and DNA collection company called MyHeritage. Deep Nostalgia™ uses AI programming to make deepfakes out of people’s family photos, by interpreting or identifying the underlying bone structure of the person pictured, and then animating the image along algorithmic pathways determined by that shape and structure, mapped to a series of “typical” movements.

A deepfake can be made from any technology that algorithmically transforms an original media object so that it behaves differently yet believably — so for instance using snippets of extant yet unrelated speech to make it seem like a person in a video is saying something other than what was said in the original text. Intriguing (and harrowing!) examples of such technology can be witnessed on the show For All Mankind, which uses deepfakes to alter historical news and media footage to fit the show’s alternate timeline, or the recent Tom Cruise deepfakes posted to TikTok in 2021.

This morning in Blackness: Deep Nostalgia edition was originally published in salt.codes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Collapse started as a collage created for Queer Archive Work’s Urgency Reader 2. The publication was released in April 2020 after a 10-day open call asking artists to generate work, urgently, in response to the current moment. We were only a few weeks into the COVID-19 pandemic and the pages of Urgency Reader 2 reflect that.

I worked on the Urgency Reader 2 version of Collapse 2020 over the course of a day and developed an animated, interactive version for screen in the 2–3 days after. I took the word ‘urgent’ seriously, working with little iteration, feedback, or revision (I rarely work like this and it was a good, constructive struggle).

Now, a year later in April 2021, I find myself revisiting the work. We are still in the COVID-19 pandemic that pushed this project into existence. Personally, I find it difficult to discern what has changed and what has stayed the same. I feel both a sense of monotony and a cataclysmic shift in my own life and the world. I also feel that we have been here before.

Collapse 2021 is an extension of the Collapse project — of remixing, rethinking, and rewinding. It’s a practice of rapidly creating art that I hope to continue annually as a series of interactive digital collages.

Both (and future) pieces of the project can be found here: https://collapse.awwsmith.com

Collapse: A Practice of Urgent Remixing was originally published in salt.codes on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.