Dark Matters
Over the summer of 2020, I was part of the School For Poetic Computation (SFPC) cohort for Dark Matters: Critical Theory of Technology, which was about “the racialized history of surveillance” and interrogating “the positioning of white as neutral within interfaces as forms of violence enacted through high technology.” I signed up for this class to learn about the biases and inequalities shaping modern technologies as I started diving deeper into creating art as a form of social commentary. But it felt even more relevant and surreal as the Black Lives Matter events unfolded during the third week of class, which we were able to discuss in real time and (un)learn together. Here are two illustrations I contributed to the final project of the class inspired by key terms from our readings.
Epidermalization
As defined in Simone Browne’s Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, “is ‘literally the inscription of race on the skin.’ It is the disassociation between the black ‘body and the world’ that sees this body denied its specificity, dissected, fixed, imprisoned by the white gaze.” This illustration depicts a person trapped by a pale shell forming from scar tissue crawling over their bodies and the horrific internalization process of witnessing that transformation.
Settler Colonialism
A collaborative poem with Diana Marin, which was inspired by a key question about settler colonialism in Jackie Wang’s Carceral Capitalism—“which axis of dispossession is the ‘base’ from which the ‘superstructures’ of national sovereignty, or even subjectivity itself emerge.” Are we all complicit in the system and how do we make sense of the complex web of intergenerational trauma and healing? This illustration uses a continuous line loosely depicting several tangled people in positions of prayer.
Made with Procreate & Photoshop