Keynote

Poetic Operations: Toward Algorithmic Analysis

"We are making an honest attempt to solve the most significant problems of our day." This is one of the organizing principles of the Allied Media Projects, and a guiding principle in my work. I want to urge digital humanists, designers and computer scientists to take up this principle, and demonstrate how my work does so by addressing the global challenges of racial and gendered violence. After an increase in visibility for trans women of color in 2014, the number of murders of trans women dramatically increased in 2015, from fourteen murders to twenty-one. The increase in murders of trans women of color year after year underscores the deep need for strategies other than simple visibility or invisibility for trans women, and this talk, based on my forthcoming book Poetic Operations, offers alternative proposals. I take up the operations of the cut and the fold already discussed in media studies, in order to propose new operations of the stitch and the shift as the basis for a trans of color poetics that is a way of understanding trans of color art and politics. These operations form the basis of an algorithmic analysis that can extend the intersectional and assemblage models used in women of color feminism and queer of color critique. These operations emerge through my practice-based research projects: Local Autonomy Networks, Redshift and Portalmetal, and Hold Your Boundaries.com.