JUNE 20, 2017 for the Open Summit in SF
Today I want to present a quick study of innovation and creativity through observership. Specifically, how queerness and blackness can lead to observations that are highly unique, creative, and non-normative. Now, it may not be a given that a black artist or a queer artist utilizes this lens – we are all socialized by the behavior and larger social and political spaces… and the institutions we inhabit. But I want to encourage all of you to give thoughtful attention and give special care to tune into your capacities for great observership.
A historian at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee by the name of Hortense Spillers says, ‘black culture is critical culture.’ And I don’t think blackness can be separated from queerness. And this is what I mean – queer and trans experience and positionality in society can mean we may exist beyond a sort of conformity – even in the tech community – which many participants find as non-conformist in some ways already right? So even in tech, the queer or queer of color critique offers a way to challenge unspoken practices and institutional structures.
Mark Bradford is an African American artist. He’s a queer man. He’s enjoyed a good deal of success and celebration in the art world, nationally, internationally. His work is beautiful. He’s found such a niche, I think, for his work in some ways because he has chosen to highlight certain ways he observes the world, and what he calls his ‘incompatible perspectives’ in ways that can clearly be understood by others as his observations.
Start song
So I’m talking about the ways he creates maps. One way he makes art is by stacking, gluing, signs, posters, newsprint, billboards, flyers he comes across in places like the South Central LA neighborhood where he grew up. Stacks them on big wood boards, glues them down, and then what he does is carve his design through this mass of colors and material. As we listen to this song he made to accompany one of his exhibits, I’ll show you some of the maps he’s created. And think about these maps he’s created through the story he tells of observership – this song is something he created to accompany on his exhibits. (As a bonus, this song, I can listen to it on repeat 30-40 times. It’s perfect for long stretches of work.)
What has been said about Mark Bradford:
The museum director of Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Jeffrey Deitch, said by e-mail that Mr. Bradford’s work “is not just art about art; it is art about life.”
He brings “the daily struggles of people left behind by the American economy into his paintings.”
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Thelma Golden, the director of the Studio Museum in Harlem said, “Mark’s work is significant because it defines art practice in relation to himself and his history, and also in relation to aesthetics.”
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Mark Bradford has built a body of work that is richly layered in both material and meaning. The MacArthur Award-winning artist's seductive works reinvigorate abstraction with social awareness. Often resembling aerial views, they subtly map the patterns of class, race, gender, and sexuality that structure American life, especially life in South Central Los Angeles
Put a little differently, another artist, Taylor Alexndr, soon releasing her first album, NOISE, recently commented, "As a queer and trans person of color trying to live and thrive in this world, you get used to the 'noise' or dissonance that comes with existing. From the noise of being a drag queen to the noise of being a part of the Black Trans Lives Matter movement, this EP captures the struggle and the success of my living.”
We shouldn’t forget – what many in tech circles, and design circles, and development circles aim to do – is actually eliminate noise. This can be called being highly efficient, or minimalist, or an evolved aesthetic. But I like the idea of noise, and the unexpected views that come from being in the street.
I would like to know if you all relate to what I’m saying here. Before we open for questions and comments, I want to leave you with a somewhat academic short discussion that I think gets to the heart of why we need bring our observations into tech innovation. It’s way, way more dire than any of successful entrepreneur or great product or idea. Maintaining a critical stance in tech becomes more and more essential the more our society gives way to technological innovation. I think you might think of many tech companies, and behaviors and expectations as you listen to this definition.
A HELPFUL DEFINITION OF "TECHNOLOGY" (Excerpt)
This definition comes from KEYWORDS FOR AMERICAN CULTURAL STUDIES BY JENTERY SAYERS, Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Maker Lab in the Humanities at the University of Victoria.
Scholars of American studies and cultural studies working on the history of technology have emphasized its social, cultural, and economic dimensions. They have tended to resist complicity in technological determinism (technology as the sole cause of cultural change), technological instrumentalism (technology as value neutral), technological positivism (technological progress as social progress), and technological essentialism (technology as having some intrinsic nature or essence). In fact, American studies and cultural studies approaches to technology are best described as “nonessentialist.” The central premise of nonessentialism is that neither technologies nor histories of technology can be divorced from the social and cultural contexts of their production, circulation, or consumption (Ross 1990). American studies and cultural studies approaches begin with the claim that technologies can be made, interpreted, and used in multiple and often contradictory ways (Ihde 1990; Feenberg 1999; Haraway 1985). They share with “constructivist” approaches common to both fields a focus on the ways in which social conditions and meanings shape how people create, perceive, and understand technologies. But they also underscore why the technical particulars of technologies—how technologies turn this into that (Fuller 2005)—really matter (Galloway 2006; Gitelman 2006; Bogost 2007; Kirschenbaum 2008). They frequently note that a technology can articulate complex relations between actors in a given network, rendering decisions for them beyond their own knowledge or awareness (Latour 1987; Kittler 1999; Galloway 2004; Chun 2011). From a nonessentialist perspective, technologies are never simply “extensions” of human beings or human rationality (McLuhan 1964/2003). Instead, technologies exist in recursive and embodied relationships with their operators, and they must be understood through their social, cultural, economic, and technical processes, all of which are material.
The nineteenth-century definition of “technology” as a practical application of science persisted well into the twentieth century, especially through the proliferation of phonography, photography, cinema, radio, and other utilitarian modes of mechanical reproduction (T. Armstrong 1998). The effects of this proliferation were perceived variously across contexts, but a common question during the first half of the twentieth century was how—through technology—politics were aestheticized and aesthetics were politicized (Benjamin 1936/1968). The totalitarian regimes of fascism and Nazism aestheticized their politics through references to technological innovation. They rendered automobiles, airplanes, cameras, radios, and typewriters beautiful objects: symbols of progress, modernity, efficiency, and mastery over nature (Marinetti 1909/2006;Triumph of the Will 1935). Once aestheticized, technologies such as cinema helped mask totalitarian violence through commodity culture and mass distribution, prompting the Frankfurt school philosopher Herbert Marcuse to write, “the established technology has become an instrument of destructive politics” (1964/2002, 232).
This common affiliation of technology with practicality explains why nonessentialist approaches are central to American studies and cultural studies: they resist the tendency either to give technologies too much authority in everyday life or to relegate people to unconscious consumers, who are incapable of intervening in systems, applications, or devices of any sort (Braverman 1974/1998; D. F. Noble 1995). They also highlight the fact that technology becomes gendered, sexualized, and racialized through its naturalization or routinization. Historically, technology has been culturally coded as masculine (Wajcman 1991; Balsamo 1996; Rodgers 2010), and it has consistently served the interests of “able” bodies, prototypical whiteness, and heteropatriarchy (Haraway 1985; A. Stone 1996; Nakamura 2002, 2008; Sterne 2003; T. Foster 2005; E. Chang 2008; Browne 2010). Yet it is important to recognize that bias or supremacy is not somehow inherent to technologies or their technical particulars. It emerges from the social, cultural, and economic conditions through which technologies are articulated with interpretive processes and embodied behaviors.
In response to this recognition, some American studies and cultural studies practitioners encourage a “technoliteracy” influenced by computer hacking, technical competencies, new media production, and critical making (Wark 2004; Hertz 2009; Ratto 2011; Losh 2012; McPherson 2012a). Andrew Ross (1990) defines “technoliteracy” as “a hacker’s knowledge, capable of reskilling, and therefore of rewriting the cultural programs and reprogramming the social values that make room for new technologies” (para. 43). Technoliteracy thus complicates Matthew Arnold’s reduction of technology to mere instrument-knowledge since it refuses to draw a neat division between physical devices and social values. More important, it involves actively intervening in technologies—at the level of systems, applications, and devices—as key ingredients in the everyday production of knowledge and culture. Thus, the question for nonessentialist investments in technoliteracy is. Technology, but for whom, by whom, under what assumptions, and to what effects?
In our so-called digital age, many people would assume that interventions in technological processes are accessible to more people than ever before. After all, the Internet has been depicted as a decentralized, democratizing, and even immaterial “cyberspace” of radical freedom—a hacker’s paradise of do-it-yourself coding, performance, and publication (Gibson 1982; Barlow 1996/2001; Hayles 1999). The trouble is that proliferation should not be conflated with access or intervention. As the very word “technology” is subsumed by industry terms such as “iPad,” “Twitter,” “Droid,” and “Facebook,” not to mention the ubiquity of verbs such as “Bing,” “Skype,” and “Google” (Vaidhyanathan 2011), the values, procedures, and biases of high-technology systems, applications, and devices grow increasingly opaque or invisible to most people, who are simply deemed “users.” On the one hand, strategies for social control and regulation persist and expand through code, algorithms, metrics, protocols, and networks, which—when compiled—exceed the knowledge base of any given individual or group (Galloway 2004; Beller 2006; Chun 2006, 2011). On the other hand, scholars and users of technology are reimagining the implications of technology and technoliteracy, especially through collaboration, experimental media, and social justice initiatives (Daniel and Loyer 2007; Juhasz 2011; Anthropy 2012; Cárdenas 2012; Goldberg and Marciano 2012; Women Who Rock 2012; Cong-Huyen 2013; Lothian and Phillips 2013).
Collaborative work around technologies allows practitioners to build alternative infrastructures, tools, and projects that are difficult (if not impossible) to construct alone (Davidson 2008; Sayers 2011). Meanwhile, experimental media afford multimodal approaches to scholarly, cultural, and creative expression, anchored not only in text but also in video, audio, images, programming, and dynamic visualizations (McPherson 2009). Such expression is central to many social justice initiatives that rely on witnessing, interviews, process documentation, real-time data, intercultural dialogue, and community-based participatory action research (Ang and Pothen 2009). When blended together, collaboration, experimental media, and social justice research suggest an exciting new trajectory… one that invites practitioners to engage the history and future of technologies at the intersection of thinking and doing, critiquing and making, immersion and self-reflexivity.