DIGITAL ART

If the future is digital,

am I there?

This ongoing work looks at digital recreations of self, exploring the limits and possibilities of technological tools which are built with inherent biases. Here CHARI is exploring the self definition and identity in the real, and examining personal, cultural, and physical dynamics and tensions. When the future arrives and we are all avatars, how might social rules and systems structures shift? Can oppressive systems be subverted, dismantled, or are they ever-present and reinforced?

06/22-ongoing

HISTORICAL CONTEXT, ERASURE, GENTRIFICATION

The project began with the Gullah Geechee people, a group of descendants of West and Central Africa who were previously enslaved in the lower Atlantic states in America.  After the end of American chattel slavery, the Gullah Geechee collectively purchased the land they had previously worked while enslaved, and built their own society, removed and protected. In doing so, they were able to  maintain their own language and cultural practices based on their West African heritage. However, over the decades as the property values have gone up, real estate capitalists found loopholes that allowed for the slow erosion of the communally held land. Today where there was once Gullah farms, churches, schools, and graveyards, there are now hundreds of vacation resorts, hotels, and golf courses. The progression of this change has been made visible with the use of satellite technology like Google Maps.

CREATIVE TOPOGRAPHY & PHYSICAL MAPPING
Maps are often tied to colonialist ideas of ownership, boundaries, and territories. Maps also create documented versions of realities that are assumed to be true. This project takes a critical perspective, examining the use of modern day mapping systems like Google Maps, and the weight that is given to what is captured and store as truth. This framework also provides a visual representation of gentrification and erasure as the archived captures of landscapes are visible. Speculative Landscapes subverts the tool by altering the output, and by doing so it creatively explores and challenges the boundaries of reality in a technical society. As a counteraction, Speculative Landscapes is also situated within the digital humanities as a method for preserving and historical narratives.  

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

“The success of Union forces in the Battle of Port Royal on Nov. 7, 1861, gave the Union control over Hilton Head Island, Beaufort, and the Atlantic coastline south to Jacksonville.  It also opened the door to freedom for slaves in the Sea Islands. By the hundreds, African Americans sought refuge from former masters by fleeing to Union-held territory.  Hilton Head Island, the headquarters of the Department of the South, initially attracted those slaves left behind on the Island when southern planters fled and subsequently provided a haven to slaves from the surrounding area, including Georgia and Florida, as well.

Referred to as “contrabands,” these runaway slaves found work, shelter, food and clothing at the Union garrison.  By late 1862 nearly 1,000 African Americans lived on the outskirts of the garrison, mostly in barracks.  Tensions grew between them and the Union soldiers and conditions in the barracks were poor.  When General Ormsby Mitchel assumed command of Department of the South in September 1862, he immediately proposed construction of a village for the freedmen adjacent to the stockade on Fish Haul (Drayton) Plantation.  By March 1863 the town was established and named in honor of the general, who had died of fever some six weeks after his arrival. 

Mitchelville was designed as a full town, with streets laid out in regular patterns and with quarter-acre plots.  Houses were constructed by the residents with materials supplied by the army.  

Source: https://heritagelib.org/the-people-of-mitchelville-18621868

MACHINE LEARNING & ARCHIVAL PHOTOS

Using archival images of Mitchelville, the first free black town in the history of the United States as both spark, and framework, I grew curious about the lives of those who lived there. Many of the archival photos I found were from long range and / or low resolution. Drawing upon the work of Saidiya Hartman, I began considering the gesture of bridging the gap between “theory and narrative”, between history and human.

For this project I am using historical photos of Mitchelville as pictorial data for visual machine learning systems, in an attempt at creating speculative portraits.

CHARI @ Jacob Lawrence Gallery with Speculative Landscape Portraits

Seattle, WA

I wrote a piece for her.

My good friend and fellow Mills alum Jake Parker Scott recorded a version of it.

Jake and and I talked about the piece beforehand and it’s significance, why I chose the saxophone, the particular articulations, and sounds, and specifically about the last measure of the piece. It’s a a measure that the player must repeat 36 times.

This is not small task for a saxophone player, but the difficulty is a part of it. The performance as well as our listening, is but a small bit of what we can offer as validation, to hold space for the life that was lost in such a tragic way.

A series of self portraits generated with AI.