American Artist is an interdisciplinary artist whose work extends dialectics formalized in Black radicalism and organized labor into a context of networked virtual life. The following interview draws on mutual interests that I and American Artist had in the graphic user interface or “gooey” of the computer screen, seen in relation to blackness and Black Studies. The interview took place via email between September and November, 2018.

Kris Cohen:

You recently published a great essay titled “Black Gooey Universe” (unbag, issue 2, 2018). There, you argue that the graphic user interface (GUI or phonetically “gooey”) of the personal computer, “a clickable interface, cursor, and remedial computer mouse,” marks a turn in the history of computing. “Before this,” you say, “computer monitors appeared black, a color native to screens at the time, upon which lines of code were input in green or white characters. Between Xerox Alto and Apple Lisa, the negative space of the screen began to appear white…”. You call this transition, from black to white screen, an “apt metaphor for the theft and erasure of [racial] blackness, as well as a literal instance of a white ideological mechanism created with the intent of universal application.” It won’t be a surprise to many people that the tech industry, with its roots in Silicon Valley and U.S. military funding, is peopled almost exclusively by white men (although today they’ve let a few white women into the club, although not without strenuous resistance by men defending their turf). Books like Safiya Umoja Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression draw out some of the implications of this demographic bias.[1] But you are pointing to an anti-blackness that is larger, longer, and more pervasive than could be indicated by the whiteness of the people allowed to work in Silicon Valley. Can you draw out your argument that the GUI, the dominant interface of all personal computers and mobile phones today, is anti-black?

American Artist:

Yeah, I think that’s a pretty accurate summation of the line I’m drawing in the text. It begins with this transitional moment, the introduction of the GUI, and I’m almost ascribing epic quality to it by pointing it out, but it’s a continuation of the underlying framework that started Silicon Valley, and existed long before it in manifest destiny and colonialism in the Western United States. There’s a book by David Naguib Pellow and Lisa Sun-Hee Park titled The Silicon Valley of Dreams that begins with the genocide of Native peoples on the West Coast, hydraulic mining during the gold rush, and the abuse of employees who are largely Asian immigrants that continues into the present.[2] This isn’t something I talk about in the essay but it gives more insight into the nature of the industry. In the essay I’m writing from the perspective of the computer user rather than those fabricating the devices in a factory. Abuse is felt here too but rather than chemical poisoning it’s a psychological issue, as a user I’m being told that whiteness is the foundation of all virtual production, that all things must progress and the only (broken) products I can afford are obsolete. By accessing information through these systems I’m only exposed to what’s considered important under a rubric of white supremacy.

One thing I would clarify is that early computers (when it was someone’s job rather than a device) were primarily women, it was not a men’s field. When it was appropriated by men, the connotation of computation had to move from feminine to masculine. This is something Wendy Chun writes about in “On Software, Or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge,” an essay that was very influential to me while writing Black Gooey Universe.[3]

To your last question (or the thing I was actually supposed to be responding to), I’m saying that if the people who designed the computer are anti-black, intentional or not, that will inevitably be reproduced in what they design, especially if is it something meant to serve “people” in general. There is no “general” when it comes to people, so when we pretend there is what’s really happening is that one person is deciding what’s best for another, and the person deciding is usually the one with the most privilege historically.

KC:

So then I would say that it’s a related, but distinct task to actually trace out how the anti-blackness of the designers and technologists gets into the products—in this case, the graphical user interface. And maybe more importantly, to describe its effects on users and on computation and computational personhood more broadly. I think you start to think about this question when you say, in the same article, that the GUI is “an abstracted representation of a person’s relationship to a machine.” Can you say more about what you mean by “abstracted” here? In part I’m interested in this version of abstraction for its potential to deflect—to better historicize—the canonical modernist version where abstraction is often understood as a flight from referentiality or representation, and then as an exploration of the material conditions of the medium. This is a version of abstraction that many black artists have been able to exploit as a platform for expanding aesthetic politics beyond the requirement (imposed both from within and from without a community of black artists) that they represent black life. But it has also been used by major institutions to rescue artists from their blackness (I’m thinking here about Susan Cahan’s Mounting Frustration: the Art Museum in the Age of Black Power and the account she gives there of “Contemporary Black Artists in America” at the Whitney (1970), which allowed black artists into the canon of modernism only if they could be seen to be participating in some sanctioned version of abstraction in which their art would be cleansed of racial politics).[4] You also have an exhibition with the title “Black Gooey Universe” (Housing, NYC, 2018), so maybe you want to talk about abstraction and the GUI with reference to some of your artworks that address these questions.

AA:

I think the best way to understand how high technology is anti-black is to consider how the United States is anti-black. The United States is foundationally anti-black and continues to extract labor and resources from black people through incarceration and debt among many other practices. To me it’s impossible to consider an entire epoch of development that occurred in a bubble of almost entirely white American men in California, exuding anything other than anti-blackness. In this text I was drawing heavily on afro-pessimist thought, Frank B. Wilderson III, to envisage a black gooey that lives in contradistinction to the white gooey that has become formative for contemporary society.[5] If you want to consider it more pragmatically, it’s like this—there is no such thing as a universality, if one kind of person makes something it will suit the needs of that person and inevitably exclude everyone else. In the case of algorithms, the sets of data on which they are trained are very limited in scope. Hardwares that recognize people often have trouble seeing dark skin. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. However I’m less interested in this aspect. I’m more interested in the psychological or ideological implications of whiteness being posited as neutral. I think this correlation is taken for granted as symbolic but it supports narratives of virtue associated with the color white.

When I say ‘abstracted’ in the text I have yet to enter a discourse of art, though I will speak more about that shortly. What I mean by abstracted is that the symbolic layers between users and the hardwares they interface with are duplicitous. As computers developed, the mechanism itself became more and more hidden to the point that most users don’t understand how their smartphones work. Not only that but the images you see on a phone screen have an arbitrary relation to what happens below. Now you have illustrations referring to specific tasks, such as a line drawing of a phone or a clock, but they don’t really need to look that way, it only looks that way so you can have a causal expectation of what action will occur when you tap on those items. Imagine if you wanted to give someone driving directions to a place from memory and you drew the directions on a piece of paper. Now that person gives that drawing to their car and their car drives them to their destination. We have no idea how the car actually navigates to its destination, but we know it will happen. The hand-written directions are essentially the interface, it’s just a human-readable map to interact with something much more complex happening below.

I wanted to distinguish how I was using the idea of abstraction in the text from how it factors into my work. My sculptures are representational but are indeed abstract. They often appear similar to existing machines but their use is not quite clear. They are also not representative of or associated with a specific (Black) identity. I think, like artists such as David Hammons, I’m already Black, so the works are too. On top of that what I’m discussing is rooted in Black studies, though I often talk about it symbolically. I want to talk about certain difficulties of networked (or post-internet) life without being beholden to depicting high tech devices, the same way I want to speak about Black life without necessarily depicting it, but by having this desire I’ve created a two-fold conundrum. Both of these subjects are hard to depict in such a way, but that’s been my concern since the production of Black Gooey Universe. I have faced situations in which my work has been “rescued from my Blackness” as you put it, which I find to be the troubling aspect of working at the intersection of art and technology. Just like the field of technology, the group of artists working with it is predominantly white and male, and is mostly concerned with the novelty of the devices which they utilize. This has never been interesting to me, and I generally try to remain in conversation with artists that are at least interested in critiquing these forms. The unique thing I’ve noticed about being in an exhibition with many white artists using technology is that I’m not tokenized, because my race is never a factor for my inclusion in the show. I’m the one artist in the show who happens to have a race at all (that isn’t white), so my identity is erased from the work merely by not being engaged with by anyone, including the curator. Afterall, my name makes it easy to do that.

In Black Gooey Universe I wanted to imagine an alternate realm of the interface, one that doesn’t foreground whiteness. Taking something referred to in The Undercommons as ‘the wild beyond’ and applying that to the interface of devices we use most often.[6] To imagine something I considered in opposition to technology as we know it, I focused on qualities that stood in contrast to what we associate with our current devices “black gooey [is] antithetical to the values of the white screen. Black gooey might then be a platform of slowness (“dragged time”, “colored time”), refusal, thought, complexity, critique, softness, loudness, transparency, uselessness, and brokenness.”

Mother of All Demos, 2018 is a computer made of dirt, that’s fallen apart over time. It’s functional, and it displays a command-line interface on a black screen. It’s form is taken from an Apple II, the last personal computer to only use a black interface. Black goo seeps from the keys, it looks unappealing to touch, but two plastic gloves laying on either side imply the presence of a recent user. This tells the viewer that despite its apparent obsolescence this device is useable by some unknowable being, one that lives outside the trajectory of high technological design. Untitled (Too Thick), 2018, in a similar manner is a cell phone that has been extruded to the point that it is too thick to hold or use. It appears like many phones stacked and formed into one monolithic device, from which a bulging black interface emerges. I think of this too as useable and knowable and habitable, qualities of Black life that are only understood by those living within it. The final sculpture was a 12 x 12 grid of cracked smartphones on the floor, titled No State, 2018. I wanted to allude to the broken phones used by many though they are told this is inappropriate or that there is something wrong and that they should get a new phone. I wanted to consider the space of brokenness as habitable and knowable, rather than a site of rejection.

I didn’t feel that it was possible to depict the black gooey as an interface. I found that my own images of what an interface could be never exceeded exaggerated variations of the interfaces that have already become ubiquitous. For this reason the only working interface in the exhibition was the command-line. This was a means of abstraction by leaving the possible iterations of a software relatively untapped. Most of the formal decisions of the works were manifest as hardware.

KC:

This response is so great and rich.

The title Mother of All Demos comes from a famous demonstration by Douglas Engelbart in 1968. In histories of computing, people will draw a hard distinction between Engelbart’s NLS or oN-Line System and Apple’s later version of the graphical interface (Thierry Bardini’s book Bootstrapping makes this point). So while both used panes or windows, some would say that Engelbart didn’t actually pursue one of the models of abstraction you define below. Yes, he introduced symbolic layers between the user and the computer. But he did so to “augment” the human by embedding him (it was always “him” in these histories) more deeply in the computer (he spoke of the human and the computer “co-evolving”) rather than freeing the human of the computer as in the doctrine of “user friendliness.” But I think that approaching this history through Black Studies, while not erasing such distinctions, sees or refracts them differently. Your Mother of All Demos (2018) refers to Engelbart’s work but also to Apple’s work, two decades later. What connects those strands of the GUI’s history, for you? You say the two plastic gloves flanking the computer refer to a user, and that “[t]his tells the viewer that despite its apparent obsolescence this device is usable by some unknowable being, one that lives outside the trajectory of high technological design.” This unknowable being, seen alongside with your desire not to depict but to, in a certain sense, abstract new technologies, suggests that maybe what connects these histories is the way they participate in a history of personhood, of shifting conceptions of (as Sylvia Wynter might put it) the human.[7]

AA:

I think this gives too much credit to Engelbart. Whenever I discuss the history of computing, especially critically, there are two camps, those who don’t have a particular stance on it and those that are invested in the mythology of its creators. The Mother of All Demos is extremely famous because it was the first example of a demo, and it displayed technologies that were extremely innovative at the moment. But these two eras, that of Apple and SRI are united in their humanistic approach which effaced subjectivity for an early form of freedom in technology. Though Steve Jobs and Engelbart were working at different moments they share a similar subjecthood by being white men in tech who are major proponents of “innovation” as an inconsequential benevolent pursuit. The reason I associate them with one another in Black Gooey Universe is because the tools that Engelbart designed were eventually co-opted into the Apple Lisa. Their differing intentions are only significant under a framework that takes for granted the similarities they share.

When I say “unknowable being,” I don’t mean a non-being. What I’m referring to is the impossibility of the white men designing technology to ever empathize or understand the lived experience of someone outside of their demographic, that is the “unknowable being.” In Black Gooey Universe, I’m referring to the Black user. But this basic argument could be applied to many users that aren’t present in the design process, whether that means they are physically not present, or it means they have secured jobs in the field but are ideologically indoctrinated into a process that maintains the status quo. The decision to depict the user as unknowable to everyone visiting the gallery was to abstract what unknowability looks like, which wouldn’t have happened if I had made a computer that was meant to only be used by Black people, for example. First of all, what would that even look like? Second of all, people would see it and assume they understood it. I wanted to convey this other space outside of our collective knowledge of how a device is supposed to be, that upholds its own eloquent logic that viewers want to understand.

KC:

You mentioning offhandedly a computer “meant to only be used by Black people,” alongside the idea we’ve been discussing that computers have of course been designed by and FOR white people, makes me think about the limitations of inclusion as a model of justice or repair. While I have lots of faith that computers would look very different today if they had been envisioned all along with significant, equal input from Black people (which basically is a thought experiment that requires rethinking the world from the ground up), I have almost no faith at all that if a cadre of “post-racial” designers had Black people in mind as their model computer users the results would be any better. Different, maybe, but as you say, there’s a great danger in people “assum[ing] they understood.” So while exclusion is brutal and violent and distorting, inclusion isn’t an adequate response. A world structured on racism introduces asymmetries everywhere (I think this is, in part, why Moten and Harney are so skeptical about critique in Undercommons). In this context, your thinking about “unknowability” as a form of abstraction seems really important. Can you unfold a little more slowly what you mean when you say that with Black Gooey Universe you wanted to (and I love this phrasing) “abstract what unknowability looks like?” For example, how does abstraction there work in relation to the form of abstraction we discussed before, where the GUI abstracts the computer by introducing a distance, but also by creating an interface that assumes it knows something about its user (abstracting the computer, but also abstracting the human)?

AA:

I wasn’t trying to portray a post-racial group of designers that would have Black people in mind, what I’m saying is Black people have Black people in mind—but regardless, I agree that “inclusion” is not an end-all method of attaining justice or repair, I’m just thinking about decolonization in the realm of technology, which reflects the patterns of society at large. While I agree that decolonizing technology as such is impossible I don’t think that it shouldn’t be thought about or even attempted. I think being dismissive toward any possibility of reconciliation also precludes whatever realities we might discover through that process. I would rather the designers of Silicon Valley drive themselves into a hole trying to reconcile their practices than to dismiss it as a non-viable option. I think the only ethical position in this moment for people with various privileges is a position of embarrassment or discomfort—the discomfort of acknowledging your privilege, the discomfort of knowing that reconciliation may not be possible, and the discomfort of attempting it anyway, that’s what people should be prepared for.

I think what you’re saying also reflects how an afro-pessimistic logic informed my thinking around these works. For Afro-Pessimists, anti-blackness is not reconcilable. Society as such necessitates anti-blackness to maintain itself. The only viable solution to decolonial practice is ending the world. This is a very cut-and-dry theory that really does say reconciliation is not possible without the destruction of the world. In my works this was useful for—rather than thinking of how to fix the white screen or make it “inclusive”—imagining the black realm that exists but hasn’t been categorized as a realm at all.

In a recent work, which is a continued exploration of Black Gooey Universe, I thought about what a practice might be for bringing the devices we’re familiar with, those white-screened interfaces, into the Black Gooey Universe. Untitled (Portal), 2018 is a sculpture and Don’t Boil Your iPhone in Coca-Cola!, 2018 a video, where we witness someone place a working iPhone into bubbling black goo in anticipation of a violent chemical reaction. In the video this is an entertaining test of the iPhone’s integrity, but the subtext is that this practice will bring the phone into the Black Gooey Universe, or make the interface Black. What actually happens in the video is that a plume of smoke comes out of the device and the phone is destroyed. The subtext of this is that the two realms are ultimately irreconcilable.

KC:

Maybe your idea of the irreconcilability of the black realm brings us to a last way to understand abstraction. In this sense, abstraction could be an affective response—what the black realm feels like from the perspective of, say, Apple designers, who live on the other side of that barrier of irreconcilability. But also a differently-organized aesthetic category—in your work Don’t Boil Your iPhone in Coca-Cola!, this might be the plume of smoke: an abstraction, which is also evidence of literal destruction, that discharges from the forced encounter between two irreconcilable realms.

You also let us to go back to something we discussed earlier: the “troubling aspect,” as you put it, “of working at the intersection of art and technology.” It’s a scale problem, in a way. It’s like no one knows quite what scale to work at when dealing with the impacts of technology on life. It does relatively little to add a few black designers to the team of people working on the iPhone, much as we might want and fight for that small change. But then if the single technology is not the right unit of analysis, then what is it? The platform? The stack? The network? Or just the world itself? And Black Studies, specifically Afro-Pessimism, might say in response, yes, that’s precisely the problem, the scale of analysis is never large enough, it goes right up to the very destruction of the world, which is irreconcilable with life as we know it.  And that is precisely the productive impasse to which Black Studies, and maybe a Black Studies-inflected media art brings us: the plume of smoke.

In addition to any responses you might have to these thoughts, would you mind concluding by talking about where your work and thinking about the Black Gooey Universe goes from here?

AA:

That’s a funny image, I do think white people feel like they’re putting out fires when they respond to criticism from us, so it makes sense that this failed reconciliation would look like a plume of smoke. Attempts at “diversity and inclusion” after the fact always feel like water being thrown on a fire. it reminds me of how, whenever someone is critical of an institution that was not designed with them in mind, they are a problem, especially Black women. But let’s say the plume of smoke is the end of the world—I think of it as a non-event, that’s the other layer to this film, it’s humorous, it’s comic relief, as if to say “let’s go ahead and end the world. Let’s do it all over again, without colonization this time…”

As far as the scale of the criticism I’m honestly not so interested in the specific physical forms of computers and hardware. I’m interested in the immaterial aspects that are more timeless and that affect people on a social scale. There are conditions we associate with computers and smartphones that I’m interested in—living post-internet, gratuitous data accumulation, biometric surveillance, and algorithms that influence how we live. These mechanisms allow the same social problems to be reinstated in new ways. For example, I’m really influenced by Simone Browne’s notion that methods used to traffick enslaved people are early forms of biometric technology, such as branding and identifying them based on their physical features.[8] It’s really interesting to me to think about what things haven’t changed in all that time. Rather than focusing on the iPhone, what do the iPhone and the Book of Negroes have in common? If you can identify enough cross sections between the past, present, and future then the specific devices fade into the background and the unfavorable intentions embedded in them start to emerge.

I’m not sure where I go from here with Black Gooey Universe. Part of making an argument is that you quickly realize the limitations of your own critique. But I do think the central idea is very much intact and something I feel strongly about. Someone asked me how Black Gooey Universe manifests socially and I thought about Black artists that make space online for Black people to celebrate Black content, for example Mandy Harris Williams’ #BrownUpYourFeed or RAFiA’s #ForBlackHealing among others. It feels very much like the environment they facilitate online was never meant to exist within the platform and they work really hard to maintain it because they know we need it. I think this is perhaps a way to think about it.

 

BIOS

American Artist lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Their practice makes use of video, installation, new media, and writing to reveal historical dynamics embedded within contemporary culture and technology. American Artist’s legal name change serves as the basis of an ambivalent practice—one of declaration: by insisting on the visibility of blackness as descriptive of an american artist, and erasure: anonymity in virtual spaces where “American Artist” is an anonymous name, unable to be googled or validated by a computer as a person’s name. American Artist attended the Whitney Independent Study program as an artist. They are a resident at Abrons Art Center and a 2018-2019 recipient of the Queens Museum Jerome Foundation Fellowship. They have exhibited at The Kitchen, New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and have participated in group shows internationally. They have published writing in The New Inquiry and New Criticals and have had work featured in Mousse, ARTnews, AQNB, and Huffington Post. Artist is a co-founder of the arts and politics publication unbag.

Kris Cohen is Associate Professor of Art and Humanities at Reed College. As the Mellon Network Fellow at the Clark Art Institute (Williamstown, MA) in 2019, Kris will be completing a new manuscript that accounts for how a group of Black artists working from the sixties to the present were addressing, in ways both belied and surprisingly revealed by the language of abstraction and conceptualism, nascent configurations of the computer screen and the forms of labor and personhood associated with those configurations.

[1] Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York: New York University Press, 2018).

[2] David N. Pellow and Lisa Sun-Hee Park, The Silicon Valley of Dreams: Environmental Injustice, Immigrant Workers, and the High-Tech Global Economy, Critical America (New York: New York University Press, 2002).

[3] Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “On Software, or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge,” Grey Room 18 (January 2005): 26–51.

[4] Susan Cahan, Mounting Frustration: The Art Museum in the Age of Black Power, Art History Publication Initiative (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).

[5] See, for instance: Frank B. Wilderson, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).

[6] Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Wivenhoe; New York; Port Watson: Minor Compositions, 2013).

[7] Sylvia Wynter and David Scott, “The Re-Enchantment of Humanism: An Interview with Sylvia Wynter,” Small Axe 8 (September 2000): 119–207.

[8] Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015).