Digital Diaspora

Okay You're Black...

2006-03-24T17:28:00.000-08:00

Recently, I visited a show of contemporary artists. The show featrured mixed mediums: video, prints, paintings, sculpture. But what caught my eye were a small collection of jewelery. The work, created by a local Black Artist, was exceptionally Black. Let me explain. Like a comedian relying on established themes, daily occurances, and stereotypes, the artist in question simply regurgitated a series of pro black icons effectively distancing the viewer from our culture, and his experience. It is too easy to show a slaveship proper, or a broken shackle as a declaration of Blackness. So easy in fact that it approaches parody of the very Blackness and individuality the artist seeks to assert. Ironically, the work is at the surface, on the skin and appears to go no deeper than a cursory glance an Pro-Black Newsletter. I have been there, I have made this kind of work in undergrad and know where its inspirations lie. The need to find a voice when surrounded by dissimilar ones combined with a shakey sense of self can cause many to go with what they know people know about them: You're Black. That self must be found and the voice must be widdled into a fine point. I know myself enough to know that I can speak only of my own experience as a Black man. I did not limp through fields in shackles or scream through the bowels of slaveships as I watched masters rape my women and children. Rather I respect the struggle of those Africans and African-Americans so much that I dare not cry wolf as if I watched the ships board and later heard the synchronous clatter of chains fall. Come on. Show some respect to those who actually lived through it. Speak about what's happening now and damn it don't tell me your gonna draw bondage and cotton fields. I hate to say it but...just showing me cottonfields isn't enough. Okay, I'm working on a project that addresses this issue uprfront. Its a fabric sculpture.

End of Wintersession

2006-02-13T04:48:00.000-08:00

It is the end of wintersession and the FAV courses have been great. I've made more progress on my film than I'd imagined I would and now I think that I need more drawing courses and more film courses. RISD: an interesting place. Dave Chapelle had an interview on the Actor's Studio that was really insightful. Both his parents were professors and his mother worked with Lumumba abd founded the first African studies program in the country. Chapelle is a genius and at 23 he had just stared in a movie he wrote. I'll be 24 this year and what he said made me consider my goals or at least evaluate the commercial aspects of what I'm doing. I'm worrking with another person on a film, which is really first post grad. And I am working with people outside of my race on a extremely personal project. I think the perspective provided by outside voices can only help my project. Films shouldn't be made alone. This philosophy should help me continue to stay interested making films even after I get out of school. The world of television is not the world I want to be relegated to, unless I am a writer. Here are some artists I like. Oh and I am going out for Skowhegan next year, so I am trying to work harder this year. http://www.derekeller.com/artists.html www.rare-gallery.com James Davis I'd like to find my other notes again. Talking about race is very difficult and will always influence my work. I would like to let some of my work drift into a unknown zone and to increase my writing skills in preperation for ,u thesis and future writing jobs.

Like Minds Michael Ray Charles & Trenton Doyle Hancock

2005-11-08T04:02:00.000-08:00

This guy along is doing work that confronts racial stereotypes head on through imitation. I definitely need to find a way to make my blackface characters less like blackface and more original. Trenton Hancock has done this effectively although the mythical tales he spins are often obtuse, but in a good way. Here is a quote by Michael Ray Charles:

"I've seen some black folks refer to these images as black folks. I've seen and heard white folk refer to these images as black folks. And it's really disturbing. They don't say images, they don't say representations, whether grotesque or accurate or abstracted...That's troublesome because...they're images that are constructed, they're both black and white, conceived in a white mind and believed in the black mind." — Michael Ray Charles

The first image is Trenton Hancock the second is Michael Ray Charles

Conversation with Black Digital Artist Carmen Karasic

2005-11-04T21:40:00.000-08:00

And the more i tried to see your point, the more lost i got. At this point i think i probably entirely missed your point. So what exactly were you saying? You asked "where are the Basquiats of digital art?" -- What exactly did you mean by that? Did you say 'all digital art is concerned with technology rather than with content'? If so, can you elaborate on that? The more i think about it -- the easier it is for me to find examples of tech art that is not concerned with the tech as much as with expressing a statement about the content in the work. carmin In my work I am struggling with distribution. Which medium can best convey my message and which medium provides the most immersive experience for the viewer. Specifically, I want to implicate the viewer. That said, if for example I wanted to have the participant feel as if they were living out fantasies by masquerading as a Black man. Is cinema the best tool, performance, digital mirror, VR, net art, sound installation? By asking the question of medium to suit content I look to see whether my content has been expressed in these mediums. To my knowledge, there have been no digital mirror, VR, rapid prototyping, projects that attempt to express how it feels to be Black and male. Now, I have seen web based projects by Glen Liggon and David Hammons has attempted some interesting things, but I am being very specfic, I have not seen a digital Kehinde Wiley. In Freestyle, I saw a few video artists and was intrigued, but I only saw their work in print documentation. You asked if a message had been conveyed in a book why express it again? Or should it be recreated in digital media? I admit the book is usually better than the film, but not always. I want to express what books cannot and that is the tactle physical experience coupled with the disorientation of taking the participant to a new place (as with a good book) only in a public setting. To do this, I feel a painting can only get so far, and a visual web baed project may be too detached. Street graffiti artists have a way of changing the urban landscape with subtle or overt placement of images. I want to see how artists are using new media to talk about the social landscape. Let me be very specific. I mean people discussing identity first. Basquiat, like Kehinde Wiley, used his medium to discuss identity among other issues.Referencing Charlie Parker, Basquiat used the copyright symbol constantly; an example of referencing other media to create new interpretations the way hope digital media will.Where are the Black artists doing discussing race in new media? leon

Kanye West as Kanye West

2005-11-04T17:58:00.000-08:00

I took this weekend to listen to Kanye's album and was pleased with how beautiful the music was. However, all this talk of Kanye West as some new a revolutionary Black rapper is misplaced. West's most insightful rhymes are personal stories not didactic yarns on the ills of America. To be sure, I am happy someone is saying this stuff, but it raises Bayard Rustin's notion of using "politics over protest." Rustin was a protestor who organized Martin Luther King Jr.'s march on washington and later worked with LBJ to craft civil rights legislation. Rustin was perceived as a trader to the fight in doing this. Not so. The man had said enough and wanted to change things not just bring them to the light but to make the light change accordingly. Kanye West is saying things many African-Americans know, but so did Mos Def, Taib Kweli, and Cornel West. What has been sold is a Black man in a new wrapper. Kanye is still a braggadocious rapper like all others, but he is lying to us all the while. He crafts melodies that reference sacronistic Black music: Motown, gospel, Gil Scott-Heron, but his music is not really about them. His music cares more about the superficial saccharine flavored blackness. He uses these musical references as quotes like signifers of his authenticity and proceedes to rhyme about his trivial lifestyle. Dichotomy makes great music to listen to: he knows this. But what about when he is mimicing the beat, a gospel song or the last poets, with his words? Kanye's best work there is with Talib Kweli on "just to get by" and a Gil Scott piano loop. But on his latest album "crack music" stands out as an especially didactic track aimed at informing listeners of rap music as a product disenfranchised Black people created in response to white oppression. Kanye's analogy of the CIA placing crack in Black neighboorhoods and people complaining about Black drug dealers is apt as Black rappers are equated with dealers peddling the product of a subversive "white?" market. But they sell it back to white people. He is no Public Enemy, a group that sold out concerts with far more militant music. Kanye's chorus "that's that Crack music nigga, that real Black music" has a sardonic air, saying what is Black music but a drug the country is hooked on. He questions what Black music is. When he tries to say anything psuedo-Black-revolutionary it comes off more coordinated than his outfits. The beats fit the rhymes, but what did I say about dichotomy? It makes great music. I don't want to hear "crack music" I want non-Black people to hear it and Kanye knows they will, but will it be dismissed?
When I was in Berkeley I ran across this white guy who loved rap music, but only the conscious music. We were in a class that analyized Black literature and later Tupac. We played some rap songs and commented on them and read the lyrics. At the end of the class both the white student and I approached the teacher,an arab-american, and told him he was being one sided and needed to hear the socially conscious rappers. I proposed the usual supects and so did the other student, but when I suggested Kanye West the white student said" not him, he's not as good as the others. he's fake." But that was the point. Kanye West is a middle class kid expressing himself in a genre designed orignally by urban minorities articulating the ills of poverty, disenfranchisement, police harrassment and neglection that manifested fame and sometimes fortune. Kanye West is fake in that he not in that situation and never was. What's real about his work is its transparency. Kanye has none of gifts of better rappers and tries affect an edge earned by life but not life on street selling drugs or in a ghetto. The joke is he's not a rapper and he knows it, but he dosen't always. Kanye is an outsider in that he is a middle class Black man, now upper class Black man speaking about his life in a genre for people with harder lives. This simulates a depth through exclusion in his work as if to say "look I've been through hard stuff too, nobody beleived in me, and look what I did." He is trying to prove himself to the ghetto that he has never been a part of. Is this ghetto more Black than the suburbs? Hell no. But Then dichotomy makes great music. This guy looks lost and understandably. His work is better when he is himself, not Kanye West in the role of a rapper. Songs of note: Spaceship, Roses, Addiction, Apologize, Crack Music Listen the only thing more played out than gangsta music is complaining about gangsta music. I could say more but I'm still thinking about it all. Links Plight of Conscious Black Rappers

Unstuck

2005-10-27T14:39:00.000-07:00

This is an idea for an animation about many racial topics. I have presented my pencil tests and character mock-ups to professors and peers and received good feedback. Notable comments: "combine hand drawn and computer styles to create a blend of animation, create a story, create an operatic narrative, Skin is the power of the piece, a video game interface for possible interactivity undermines the work. I will post more actual examples of the work later. This is just a log to keep track of progress. Look more later.

McLuhan’s Hot and Cold Mediums Not Served Well at Room Temperature

2005-10-27T11:18:00.000-07:00

McLuhan’s Hot and Cold Mediums Not Served Well at Room Temperature LBelt In this essay I will reveal the flaws of interpreting media and its relation to man according to Marshall McLuhan and the possible ramifications his interpretations have for digital media and my own work. It is best to construct this argument as a proof; first asserting the facts and variables according to what McLuhan has given in his text. High definition equals “being well filled with data. ” Low definition means, “being given meager amounts of data” Hot mediums extend one single sense, and in high definition Cool mediums are equal to low definition, i.e. telephones Hot mediums are high definition, i.e. radios Cool mediums require more participation and self-completion “Well filled” is a conditional statement allowing for variations. Being well filled with data when watching a cartoon may mean limiting the amount of visual clutter in order to emphasize the emotive qualities of a character in a scene, thus providing the viewer with just the amount of visual data needed to understand the animator’s message. The same is done with writing, film, and speech. The audience is only given what is needed to convey a message. To be well filled with data is simply to be afforded enough data to understand a point or points. In this regard, low definition or meager information, may be the most communicative. When giving directions to a location, giving too much information can confuse a navigator. When crafting paintings or poetry it can be more communicative to give less quantitative data i.e. brushstrokes, words, syllables, than to muddy a stanza with verbiage. It is the quality of line that is important not how many, in a sketch. McLuhan believes that humans feel the effects of mediums in one dimension through one sense. Radio, a hot medium with high definition, is not absorbed in one dimension. Radio is absorbed in one dimension as much as a novel is only seen and not heard, tasted, smelt, or touched. Listening to a sports event with a broadcaster can allow listeners to visualize the game and recall experiences associated with the crack of a bat or the blowing of a whistle. Furthermore, the innately blind may visualize a world with radio information that recalls memories linked to other senses such as smell, or touch. The spoken word is the only medium McLuhan seems to afford the power of “all the senses”, and yet he feels radio is a less interactive medium. The amount of data to the ear is only a gateway to the other senses. McLuhan is more concerned with the external or outward effects of mediums on societies: the actions. Experience is internal. Thus participation is relative to the participant. There is place between hot and cold. Television is a prime example or a seemingly one-way medium providing both auditory and visual information, that is both hot and cold, low and high definition. McLuhan believes television to be a cold medium, which requires the audience to complete or interpret the paltry information given and which is more interactive than radio, or movies. However, what about the TV-movie? What about the simple directives from countless promotional programming that simply “asks” or “tells” the viewer to watch a show at a certain time? How participatory is the act of receiving instructions from a television? A television can be highly descriptive when distributing information about an ensuing hurricane with graphics and sounds, making it a high definition medium, but unintelligible when describing the smells of a hurricane-devastated neighborhood, making it a low definition medium. The dual nature of television as a medium and its translation over multiple senses at once, speaks to the uselessness of McLuhan’s hot and cold medium labeling. Labeling is an unfortunate affliction of the author. The bias of terms like “backwards” when describing countries, “civilized” when describing Western people or cultures, “barbariac” when describing cultures using non-phonetic roman alphabets, discredit the author on many points. There is a deliberate construction of the “other,” a constant in the history of Western Europe and particularly, Great Britan. McLuhan could well have authored “The Bell Curve” using his logic on the conquering of lesser nations with the homogeneity, uniformity, and continuity” of the Roman alphabet. To McLuhan the Greeks and Romans had a sense of logic that followed a cause and effect, ordinal laying out of things analogous to their phonetic alphabet. The technology of this alphabet allowed users to translate sights and sounds into meaningless symbols and force uniformity upon them. The alphabet was the precursor to colonialism. It was a handicap of the “other” nations that their alphabet was more pictographic or auditory or subsumed more than just a visual ordering of things. The “pluralism, uniqueness, and discontinuity” in the language of these ‘other’ “tribal” communities left them primed for the detached, aggregating Western ideal of language and culture according to McLuhan. Conversely, McLuhan argues that the Western “civilized man” sacrificed his intimacy with his senses by using a roman phonetic alphabet but gained autonomy and “the personal freedom to “disassociate with clan and family.” Studying African philosophers like Menkiti who is famous for saying “I am because We are” reveals the detachment created by the roman alphabet. Not all cultures wish to be free of family or clan and not all cultures believe that to be alone is to be rational. Individualistic societies are not the norm around the world and are typically rejected in favor of more communal ones. McLuhan seems to lament to the uniqueness of cultures created by individual languages without realizing the need for such individuality internationally. I agree that the practicality of a shared language facilitates communication but the obliteration of other languages in favor of one homogenous language only weakens the interaction of the medium. Interaction is integral to all mediums. Art makes attempts use technology to engage the senses and transcend space and time. And so it is no surprise that today’s phase of interactive art faces the same questions as the alphabet. McLuhan uses the act of reading a book as proof that humans gained the ability to act without reacting: like a surgeon. Only on what scale does McLuhan advise audiences to react? When reading, is content detrimental to the manner in which we should react? Is the reaction physical or mental? Is there is such a distinction? I agree with McLuhan that today humans can act and react at the same time through he aid of technology. This means that however they react it is instantaneous. The digital artist may attempt to make work that is full of information and human interaction. This artist is at war with an audience’s power to disassociate himself from his culture in an individualistic society. The artist is competing with a shared stage where TV and movies, computers, and games provide equal interaction. Thus the invention of the digital artist is apt to become a new product for an eager venture capitalist. In the digital artist’s defense, his medium is forcing uniformity out of a homogenous language and finding the peculiarities that make it more imperfect. In addition, the placement of the art and the claiming of the digital as art is reminiscent of Duchamp and affords it more power. Just as the movie is not the TV movie, the interactive artwork is not the videogame. The subtlety is venue. However, the distinction can be meaningless when the effect is the same. Interactive art has a crisis of content and studying the power of the medium will not necessarily solve this. Rather than creating digital media to suit technology ideas should be shaped to produce innovation. The ability to print books lead to the printing of old books before it begot new ones. Perhaps, digital media has to reproduce all of the content of older art mediums before it can finds its own voice. In my own work, I confront racial identity and perception, both themes approached by many Black authors, painters, illustrators, and sculptors before my time. Just as Richard Wright gave the world a literary mirror to see the fissures in its perceptions of Black and White, redeemable hero and despicable monster, I experiment with cinema and computer vision to reveal the conceits people unconsciously adopt when judging each other. In the vein of artists like David Rokeby, my work utilizes McLuhan’s notion that audiences act and react at once to illustrate an overarching cause and affect system. Simply, by show the ramifications of a person's actions in a real space interactively and concatenating them with visual reminders of social injustice and prejudice I hope to alter these injustices. The speed at which a viewer can see him or herself in a digital mirror is perhaps as fast as with any other medium, as self-recognition is the same psychological process regardless. However, using a digital mirror, or screen that displays the viewer manipulated in front of their eyes can pool messages together and present them more rapidly. Attaching a blackface mask to any person in the mirror’s gaze creates connotations that may only intimated in cinema or literature. The medium, technology, is both hot and cold requiring interaction and providing a high amount of data. Like television, which allows viewers to change channels, but not to control the programming, my digital work allows for interaction but programs the content they receive. However, like film the audience brings their own input to the work and derives their own meanings. Particularly, if the participant is white and a blackface is superimposed over his face it may have a different meaning than with a Black participant. While debating the context the medium creates or the message of the medium provides valuable scholarly research, the content is the message in my work. The delivery method only emphasizes the content. In this case computer vision programs are the light bulb McLuhan describes as without a message. Only, the light does have a message. Lights only illuminate and shape what they touch. What is light without things to be lit? The places, people, and things that lights describe have content and meaning. The content is inextricable. To work backwards, light is only an expression of electricity, electricity an expression of energy, and energy is metaphysical. In conclusion, the content is just as important as the medium. McLuhan has rather superficially glossed over the interdependence of the medium on the content. Rather than labeling mediums to understand their relationship to man, each medium must be evaluated individually, not in categories. McLuhan’s disassociation with matters of race is evident in his failure to recognize the power of content when expressed through different mediums. In my work I hope to exploit the peculiarities of digital media when describing issues of race and how message can shape the medium and vice versa.

What You Look Like

2005-10-19T20:27:00.000-07:00

This film investigates "race mixing" in America. Some starling facts are revealed about the viewers of interracial adult films. The biggest purchasers of black male-white female adult films are white men in the red states. What does this mean? These men also preferred to watch Black men with White women. There are no facts on the purchasing habits of Black men. This film seems to bring up old miscegenation issues that I feel are still important but wish weren't. After a recent trip to Boston, I was reminded of how some people still gawk at Black people as if they've just discovered the "missing link." Perhaps I've been spoiled by the cosmopolitan Brooklyn and perhaps D.C. with its 60 percent African-American population spoiled me further, but why must I be stared at by older white people as I go about my day? Studying African-American literature at UC Berkeley, I was introduced to a theory by the professor, an Arab-American. The professor believed that African-American authors were essentially complaining about ills rather than being proactive and changes their status in life. He likened these authors to slaves saying that there wouldn't have been slaves if all the slaves decided to stop being slaves. He believed that they had internalized their status as slaves. Furthermore, he believed that women the world over were in a secondary status because they had learned to be. Of course this type of thinking is inflammatory but it has relevance. Black authors would love to write about a life that is not full of racial injustice, and many have, but the best work is personal. I would like to forget about race sometimes, but trips like the one I just made to Boston remind me that no one else has. The same is true within the Black race. Those who are biracial, specifically with some Black parent, have to deal with the fact that no matter what they think they are the brightness of their complexion determines their racial assignment for many. Context is what is missing in these myopic examples of race theory. People who refuse to see people as part of apart from the whole race typically look for easy ways to categorize them and process them. In studying the Atlantic slave trade, I learned something interesting about the exchanges between Africans and and European slave hunters. First, both parties thought the other to be cannibals. Ironically, the slave trade was based on credit. For example a Portuguese mission would travel to the Gold Coast and barter with villagers to find slaves. The locals would then travel to acquire slaves and bring them back to the coast. All the while the Portuguese would stay in the company of locals at the coast. The Portuguese gave the locals something monetary on the good faith that they would return with slaves. Of course, the process of bringing slaves back to the coast killed off many of the slaves, the middle passage would kill of whoever remained from the voyage to the coast, and those who made it to America were often the strongest and resourceful. So here I am the product of the smartest and strongest slaves, walking Boston. And just like the exchange between the Africans and the Europeans in the Atlantic slave trade, I exchange glances with the white people in a classy hotel, and they stare at me and my friends as if we have no right to be there. For more information on the slave trade facts visit my UC Berkeley African Studies professor's article at the History Cooperative. His name is G. Ugo Nwokeji, Ph.D. He has worked with David Eltis, premiere historian, cataloging the structure of the slave trade. They have a CD-ROM The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database. Also of interest are Nwokeji's discussions on gender and the reasons why more men were taken into bondage in some cases. There was also a Sub-Saharan slave trade that used African men as eunuch and women as concubines. Links Taboo David Eltis G.Ugo Nwokeji

Afro@Digital

2005-10-18T11:24:00.000-07:00

Afro@Digital This is a documentary on the influence, use, and introduction of digital technologies in Africa. This is the first of my movie listing. Look for more on Black Wall Street and other favorites. Movie Link

X-PRZ

2005-10-17T19:44:00.000-07:00

X-PRZ X-PRZ is a biracial "art band" of four artists: Tony Cokes, Doug Anderson, Kenseth Armstead, and Mark Pierson . The group's "cultural actions" have taken the form of installation, photography, painting, sculpture, and video. I recently saw one of Tony Cokes' films at Pixelerations in downtown Providence. I am trying to find out more about Mr. Coke's and this group.
In the 1960's, pioneer artist, Romare Bearden was in an art group called Spiral that was very influential in its time, only all the members were Black. The group's name is based on the Archimedean spiral that "moves outward embracing all directions, yet constantly upward." Bearden proposed his collage ideas to the group and was shot down only to pursue a successful career utilizing his collage technique. Perhaps, like DangeMouse's Grey Album, X-PRZ, with its biracial makeup, is indicative of the synthesis needed to reach today's audiences. Where are today's up and coming art groups, concerned with race and politics? ?If it can be said that African-Americans today are too fractured by class to be united, is it impossible to form a group of African-American artists that can speak for all? Anyone interested in forming such a forum should make this blog their first point of departure Links

X-PRZ link

Keith& Mendi Obadike

2005-10-17T18:29:00.000-07:00

Selling Blackness Online Keith Obadike received his MFA at Yale's program in Sound Design. I have provided links to articles on Keith and Mendi Obadike. Of particular interest is the fact that Keith sold or attempted to sell his Blackness on eBay. Link to Articles

Obadike's Articles

Obadike's Articles II