The culture of resistance

Afrofuturist Artists Craft A Virtual World For Women Of Color

01/18/2017 12:45 pm ET | Updated Jan 23, 2017

“Neurospeculative AfroFeminism” combines technology and fantasy to expand your imagination and physically optimize your brain.
By Priscilla Frank


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It was the summer of 2016 and molecular and cellular biologist/multidisciplinary artist Ashley Baccus-Clark was gifting herself a day of self-care. The police shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile had left her, like so many black Americans, anguished and weary. She tried to ease her heartache by visiting Storm King, the 500-acre sculpture park in upstate New York where hulking man-made forms dwell among rolling green fields.


Because it was summer, Baccus-Clark packed some sunscreen for the journey. But after applying the milky substance to her face, she was left with a purple residue caked atop her flesh, a subtle reminder that, even with something as mundane as sun protection, people of color are too often disregarded.


“Women of color have to modify products to fit who they are as people,” Baccus-Clark explained in an interview with The Huffington Post at New Inc, an incubator attached to and led by the New Museum. “Why should I have to spend my time and energy worrying about something like sunscreen? There is so much technology designed by POC [people of color] that isn’t made without POC in mind.”


She decided, then, to make some sheer sunscreen herself. And that simple, low-tech solution led to the monumental, virtual reality project “Neurospeculative Afrofeminism,” which will premiere this Friday in the New Frontier section of the Sundance Film Festival.
HYPHEN-LABSFrom left: Ashley Baccus-Clark, Carmen Aguilar y Wedge, Ece Tankal, and Nitzan Bartov.


Baccus-Clark is one member of Hyphen-Labs, a team of international women who combine art and technology to represent, protect and honor women of color. The team, who have worked together since 2014, also includes Carmen Aguilar y Wedge,a Mexican-American engineer with Cuban roots; Ece Tankal, an architect, moving image maker and multidisciplinary designer from Turkey; and Nitzan Bartov, an architect, game designer and artist from Israel.


With one foot grounded in contemporary reality and another in an imagined future, Hyphen-Labs renders both physical products and virtual reality narratives that specifically cater to black women. For the physical aspect of “Neurospeculative Afrofeminism,” Hyphen-Labs engineered a variety of speculative beauty products and accessories designed for women of color, manifesting the belief that self-care is more than just a luxury but a means of survival. A sunscreen safe for dark skin was object one.


Along with the sunscreen, the artists pioneered the prototype for a visor with a dichroic reflective surface that allows its wearers to see but not be seen. The incandescent head gear, made with cooperation from AB Screenwear, is meant for scenarios where people of color enter a predominately white space. Instead of code-switching ― or shifting their self-presentation in order to blend in ― the visor reflects any antagonistic gazes back at the watcher. The accessory symbolizes, as the artists explain, “that what we fear most is often a reflection of ourselves.”
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For their third product, Hyphen-Labs designed a pair of earrings that function as cameras and recording devices, meant to document both micro- and macro-aggressions in a safe and discrete manner. The jewelry, a collaboration with Michelle Cortese, responds to the failure of dashboard cameras and bodycams to accurately capture the ambiguous encounters through which black lives are lost without satisfactory explanation. While phones are often confiscated when they would be most useful, the earrings offer an inconspicuous and, in fact, really cute way to chronicle what POC endure on a daily basis.


While some of the Hyphen-Labs products help users survey their environment, others are meant to protect them from what the lab has identified as systematic surveillance employed by government officials. Collaborating with privacy artist Adam Harvey, the team created a silk headscarf whose pattern triggers facial recognition software to the point of overwhelming it. If at a protest, for example, hundreds of people wore the scarf, the cameras would be so triggered by the textiles they would shut down.


The idea for the headscarf emerged when Hyphen-Labs’ Ece Tankal, wearing a necklace with an eye pendant, was playing with Snapchat filters, and the app’s facial recognition software mistook Tankal’s necklace for a human eye. She wrapped herself in their carefully designed headscarf during our interview while Carmen tried to Snapchat a picture. The phone bugged out, as little puppy dog filter faces quickly popped up and disappeared all over the scarf’s fabric on the iPhone screen.
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The artists’ final product is called “The Octavia.” Its technology riffs off high-definition transcranial direct current stimulation (HD-tDCS), a non-invasive brain stimulation technique which uses electrical currents to stimulate regions of the brain. The procedure is currently used to alleviate depression and anxiety in patients, as well as to optimize a user’s mind by augmenting memory to increase creativity and work flow. In Hyphen-Labs’ take, the electrodes are combined with self-cleaning natural hair extensions in order to be weaved into textured or natural hair.


It is this final product that is at the core of the second aspect of “Neurospeculative Afrofeminism,” a virtual reality experience premiering at Sundance’s New Frontier Art festival on Jan. 20. The immersive film takes place at a “Neurocosmetology” lab ― think futuristic hair salon ― owned by a woman named Brooks. The setting alludes to the long history of salons as safe spaces for women of color and fertile ground for political and philosophical discussion.


As the viewer, after putting on your Oculus Rift helmet, you’re plunked into a chair in Brooks’ salon, ready to receive your Octavia electrodes ― aimed to increase your neuroplasticity. Your first view is of yourself in the mirror, as a black woman with long pigtail braids. This, in itself, is a powerful gesture, allowing people of all races and genders to physically see themselves as a woman of color, virtually stepping into the skin of another.


The products from Hyphen-Labs’ line are strewn about the virtual salon setting, confusing the space between real and imagined futures. While Brooks prepares you for your extensions, she chats with Naima, the salon matriarch, their conversation smoothly teetering between topics of ancient tradition and futuristic fantasy.
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Before Brooks inserts the Octavia, she warns there may be some intense visuals when the electrodes hit. Moments later, you are floating in a 3D hallucinatory dreamscape with mountains made of water and a giant eye hovering in the sky. It’s the kind of fully transportive experience that can only occur in VR, a technology that allows you to float through a dreamed-up world.


Although the viewer doesn’t actually receive Octavia electrode implants during the VR experience, the effect of the 10-minute art piece is intense. Even the simulation of receiving the extensions is palpable. The Hyphen-Labs team intends to examine just how palpable, with plans to eventually conduct anthropological and neuroscientific research on whether or not experiencing the VR piece changes how viewers engage with the world.


“We are afraid of what we don’t know,” Aguilar y Wedge explained to The Huffington Post. “By simulating engagement [with women of color], we are trying to lower fear and prejudice.” Eventually, the women hope to conduct mobile functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans on viewers while they encounter the artwork to determine if VR has a measurable effect on the brain.
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Hyphen-Labs also hopes to use the work to introduce communities to VR who might not otherwise have access to the emergent technology. The artists hope that by seeing familiar characters represented in the work, young women of color will be inspired to pursue science and tech themselves. “Where are all the black women in neuroscience?” Baccus-Clark asked. “As Marian Wright Edelman said, ‘It’s hard to be what you can’t see.’”


The necessity of black representation in film and art have made their way into the public consciousness, belatedly, in the past few years. In both arenas, it’s equally valuable to see people of color both on view and behind the scenes, as actor or image and artist, director, producer, etc. In the realm of VR, there are additional opportunities to identify and empathize with people of color.


“It’s about world building,” Aguilar y Wedge added. “This world is built for black women, but all are welcome.” The technology physically positions viewers in situations they may not otherwise encounter, not only engaging with people of color but feeling like one themselves. Many believe VR has more potential than any other medium to dispel racial bias.


However, the strong emotions VR is known for inducing are not necessarily positive. Many have written about experiencing the “empathy machine” gone haywire, with some narratives provoking anger or hatred in the viewer instead of compassion, yielding the opposite of the intended effect. VR artists like Nonny de la Peña are known for dropping the viewer into gut-wrenching and difficult scenarios, such as domestic assault. But Hyphen-Labs seems less concerned with heated narratives and more with the simple gesture of making visible what often is not, letting the viewer come to her own conclusions.


There are plenty of other prejudices the women of Hyphen-Labs are also out to eliminate. The belief, for example, that beauty products are of lesser import than high science. “They are both things that we value,” Baccus-Clark said. Or that advancements in the physical world are more legitimate than those built in the realm of art or fantasy.


“Neurospeculative Afrofeminism” premieres this weekend at Sundance, overlapping with the presidential inauguration. The artists believe their work offers a potent antidote to the small-minded world approach of the president-elect, although the issues and inequalities Hyphen-Labs addresses plagued American culture long before Donald Trump was in the picture.


For the artists, the inauguration offers a moment to reflect on many of the longstanding prejudices that America has tried to sweep out of sight. Now is the perfect moment to confront the wounds of our country, and finally, truly, begin to heal. In the face of ignorance, bigotry and ego, Hyphen-Labs serves up radical optimism, self-care, education, awareness and acceptance, through objects as mundane as sunscreen and as otherworldly as a hand-crafted alternate reality.


“We want to subvert victimization,” Aguilar y Wedge said. “The only limit is our imagination.”


“Neurospeculative Afrofeminism” will run Friday, Jan. 20, through Friday, Jan. 27, 2017, from 1 to 8 p.m. and Saturday, Jan.28, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Claim Jumper in Park City, as part of Sundance’s New Frontier Art.
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Priscilla Frank Arts Writer, The Huffington Post

2nd Annual Black Feminism, Womanism and the Politics of Women of Colour in Europe

2nd Annual Black Feminism, Womanism and the Politics of Women of Colour in Europe
A One-Day symposium | Amsterdam, 7th October 2017




2nd Annual Black Feminism, Womanism, and the Politics of Women of Colour in Europe

A One-Day Symposium
Saturday, 7th October 2017,
Amsterdam, The Netherlands

In September 2016 in Edinburgh, we welcomed over 100 activists, practitioners, artists and scholars to critically debate contemporary Black feminist and womanist theories and practices in Europe. Our first event demonstrated the possibilities of building solidarity across race, class, gender, sexuality and legal status. However, the symposium also highlighted the inter-generational tensions between veteran and newer activists and scholars about how to build and sustain inclusive and democratic Black feminist spaces for education and action.

For our second symposium, we seek to expand and deepen our debates about the theory and practice of Black feminism and womanism in Europe but also spotlight the very real conflicts between different types of women who identify as Black feminists and womanists. Our aim is to examine how we might build community, collective strategies for survival and a politics for social justice in an unstable European context wracked by a variety of crises linked to austerity measures, racist and xenophobic public discourses about migration and the rise of far right political parties and groups.

We seek activist narratives, academic papers, practice-based reflections and art/music/film contributions related, but not limited, to:
Theorising European Black feminism and womanism
Gendering racial capitalism
Building Black feminist and womanist activist spaces
Black feminism and sex work
Women of colour and the European racial contract
Developing transnational, intersectional and intergenerational coalitions
Queering European Black feminism and womanism
Race, gender and affective relations
Gendering migration experiences
Women of colour and digital diasporas
Black feminism and Black Lives Matter in Europe
Black feminism and trans* women’s rights
Women of colour and anti-fascist resistance

Please send titles and abstracts of no more than 300 words, which include your name, affiliation and contact details to woceuropeconference@gmail.com by Monday 3rd April 2017.
Organising committee

Akwugo Emejulu, University of Warwick

Marly Pierre-Louis, Tracian Miekle, and Lene Hypolite, Amsterdam Black Women’s Meet-Up

Womanism

Unification is a key cornerstone of Womanist ideology.

Womanism is a social theory based on the racial and gender-based oppression of black women, and other women of marginalized groups. There are varying interpretations of the term "womanist", and efforts to provide a concise and all encompassing definition have only been marginally successful. At its core, womanism hones in on the everyday issues and experiences of both black women and women of marginalized groups, but more importantly, womanism hopes to create an even-leveled environment for all people.[1]

Theory[edit]

Author and poet Alice Walker is credited with coining the term "womanist". From the original introduction of womanism as a social perspective, the term has evolved to envelop varied, and sometimes opposing definitions. Linda Hogan asserts that the term womanist has come to represent a feminist of color, specifically black women, since the Feminist Movement has been experienced by many as intrinsically racist.[2] While feminismcan be alienating to minorities, womanism allows black women to affirm and celebrate their color and culture in a way that feminism does not.[2] In the words of theorists such as Clenora Hudson-Weems and Alicia Boisnier, Black women struggle to identify with traditional feminism, because they do not identify with the issues that feminism typically advocates.[3] Alternatively, Delores Williams, a womanist theologian, associates womanism with the traditions and activism formed from the conditions, events, meanings and values within the African-American community. Williams further asserts that the task of the Womanist theologian is to embody activism by seeking out the voices of the unheard and the experiences of the neglected. She identifies the distinct difference between the experiences of the black woman and the white woman that makes it difficult to identify with feminism. One of the key components of feminism is to end a woman's subjugation to her male counterpart, yet there are other oppressive forces that black women face that takes precedence over the perceived subjugation of the black woman by the black man.[2] This represents an expectation and experience of the black woman as one filled with the quest for knowledge, competence, and authority that surpasses the individual, but encompasses the group.[4] This idea of community rather than individuality is further illustrated by the portrayal of a woman as the embodiment of her environment.[1] In this way womanism does not focus indiscriminately on the experiences of black woman, but desires the reconciliation of all people to their spirituality, their relationships with each other, and their relationship with nature. It characterizes women as willful and capable thereby contrasting the image of a women as subservient and inferior.[5] In doing so, womanism empowers women, and challenges them to break from the traditional definition of womanhood.

Sisterhood en mati-spel

(over Rudolf van Lier, Tropische tribaden & Joanna Werners, Droomhuid)

Twee vrouwen, bijna veertig jaar na elkaar, in twee citaten. Wilhelmina in 1949:
Diesie na va soema di mattie. Ti toe soema di mattie, dan na wan di pree foe man. Na man di go allatem na tapoe foe na trawan. Dem di grietie dem srefie nanga anoe toe dem di sooi-djie den tongo. Dem sanie diesie na foe dem kon krasie.

Joanna in 1987:
Ik voel haar aanraking, denk bij mezelf: wat gaat sneller dan een vrouwenhand die de mystieke plaatsen raakt en mij van een bezetenheid doet genieten die rommelend een voorbode is van de totale explosie vanuit mijn heuvel?

Wie de exacte vertaling van het eerste citaat wil hebben, moet maar pagina 48 van het boek van Rudolf van Lier Tropische tribaden opslaan. Het tweede citaat komt van pagina 14 van de roman Droomhuid van Joanna Werners. Beide citaten gaan over de lesbische liefde, al is de uitdrukking daarvan totaal verschillend. Is er veel veranderd in veertig jaar?

Tropische tribaden is een wetenschappelijke verhandeling van wijlen Prof Rudolf van Lier over homoseksualiteit en homoseksuele vrouwen in Suriname, en een van de weinige studies op dit terrein over niet-westerse landen. Behalve op literatuurstudie baseert Van Lier zich op de relazen - deels letterlijk geciteerd in zijn boek - van een aantal mati, lesbische vrouwen, die hij in 1949 interviewde voor zijn sociologisch onderzoek dat zou resulteren in zijn bekende proefschrift Samenleving in een grensgebied. Het materiaal dat hij toen voor zijn dissertatie ongebruikt liet, is nu in Tropische tribaden verwerkt.6
De liefde tussen vrouwen is in de creoolse volksklasse een normaal verschijnsel, constateert Van Lier. Reeds in de Afrikaanse landen van waaruit de slaven werden verscheept, bestonden lesbische verhoudingen als geaccepteerd verschijnsel, en gedurende de slaventijd tot in deze eeuw toe zijn dergelijke relaties blijven voortbestaan. Een factor in het ontstaan ervan was en is het vaderloze gezin: de vader, die lange tijd als arbeider in het binnenland verblijft of die als wakaman van hier naar daar fladdert, biedt niet de emotionele geborgenheid en sociale zekerheid die het samenleven met een vrouw geeft. De keuze van de mati voor elkaar is overigens niet alleen een negatieve keuze van de man af, maar in een maatschappij die hen niet als abnormaal ziet ook een vrije, positieve keuze voor een persoon van hetzelfde vrouwelijke geslacht.

Deze bevindingen van Van Lier, gebaseerd op materiaal uit 1949, lijken te stroken met wat Joanna Werners' roman Droomhuid in 1987 aangeeft op bijvoorbeeld pagina 111, waar de ik-figuur haar tante om raad vraagt:
Vrouwen vervullen een centrale rol in de Surinaamse samenleving, daarom is zij (de tante) er niet bang voor dat een relatie met een vrouw met twee kinderen tot onoverkomelijke problemen zal leiden.

Het lesbisch-zijn wordt niet op zich als probleem gesteld in deze roman. De ik-figuur, die Joanna heet (in de flaptekst wordt gesproken van ‘een autobiografische roman’), heeft zich van jongs af aangetrokken gevoeld tot vrouwen. Drie jarenlange relaties met vrouwen zowel in Suriname als Nederland zijn daarvan het gevolg geweest. Toch lijkt deze situatie minder gecompliceerd dan ze is. De ik-figuur krijgt grote problemen met haar moeder wanneer deze verneemt van de geaardheid van haar dochter en ook wordt gemeld hoezeer de mati-liefde verborgen wordt gehouden voor de buitenwereld. Het psychische conflict echter waar de ik mee worstelt, is welke waarde moet worden toegekend aan het zwart bewustzijn in het spanningsveld dat wordt opgeroepen in haar relaties tot/met zwarte en witte vrouwen. Dat is dus duidelijk een problematiek die zich aan de grenzen van Suriname onttrekt. De te verwachten keuze voor de zwarte vrouw Ilundi aan het einde van de roman zou sterker op Suriname betrokken zijn geweest, wanneer het boek was geeindigd met deze ijzersterke observatie van de laatste bladzijde:
Nu ik Ilundi liefheb vraagt mijn moeder nooit meer of ik wel zeker weet dat ik geen kind wil, want ik heb haar verteld dat ik bezig ben een boek te baren voor de vrouw wier schoonheid ik vierentwintig uur drink. Mijn moeder voelde aan haar onderbuik alsof ze een kind ter wereld moest brengen.