Publications

Installation image of Sondra Perry’s Typhoon coming on
at the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, 2018.

“The Technicity of Blackness: On Failures and Fissures in the Art of Sondra Perry,” in Art Journal, Winter 2021. On Sondra Perry’s diverse video and installation practice, which explores the joy and labor of survival in the aftermaths of colonial expansion and the commodification of human beings, a history she traces from the transatlantic slave trade through contemporary digital profiteering. Across these lines of inquiry, Perry interrogates the failure of film and digital animation to correctly render the Black subject even as such representational technologies are deployed in the hypersurveillance of blackness.

Still from Virtually Asian, Astria Suparak, 2021, video.
Image courtesy the artist.

Scholarly editor of “No Template: Art and the Technologies of Race,” a special issue of Media-N that was conceived amidst a resurgence of discourse on the relationship between race and the technological. This issue responds in particular to Beth Coleman and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s concept of “race and/as technology” wherein race operates as technē, a prosthesis or skill that can be leveraged by-or against-individuals within systems of power. “No Template” approaches this concept from the unique perspectives of art and visual culture, asking: How can artistic practice better elucidate the racialization of technology and the technologization of race?

Screenshot from artwork featured in the essay,
Eva and Franco Mattes’s Life Sharing (2000-2003).

“Now You’re in My Computer: Performing in the Network’s Theater of Visibility,” a chapter in The Art Happens Here (2019), the catalog accompanying the Rhizome Net Art Anthology and concurrent New Museum exhibition. This essay explores different ways artists have negotiated performativity and the condition of exposure in which we find ourselves online.

Article screenshot featuring a still from
Camille Henrot’s Grosse Fatigue (2013).

“‘And there was violent relaxation.’ Art’s Ambivalence Toward the Age of the Internet,” in VoCA Journal, spring 2018. This response to Art in the Age of the Internet: 1989 to Today, exhibited at the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art, explores the tension in art’s critical embrace of computer networks, as well as the art historical lineages established by the show.

Article supplementary material screenshot featuring a still from
Mendi + Keith Obadike’s The Interaction of Coloreds (2002).

“Color Coded: Mendi + Keith Obadike’s Black.Net.Art Actions and the Language of Computer Networks,” published in the Black Code Studies special edition of The Black Scholar, July 2017. Examining a three-part suite by Mendi + Keith Obadike, this essay argues that the works challenge the race-blind model of cyberspace to reveal that the social coding of race and color is embedded into the network itself.

“Online and Off: Interpersonal Networks and the Development of Internet Art,” published in Shift: Graduate Journal of Visual and Material Culture, November 2016. This combined essay, digital timeline, and digital map argues that the network’s communication and exchange functions are what drew artists to computer networking and formed the basis of an internet-based art practice. Details about individual communication platforms, media centers, festivals, and other on and offline social infrastructure are offered in the timeline and map, which respectively provide an overview of the chronological and geographic development of the practice.