Algorithms of Aspiration
The sound of seed data
Book a 1:1 discovery call where we will talk about your curiosity in code, the stories that have stopped you from tending to that curiosity and your coding goals to learn if Seeda School can help with all three.
What ruttier, internalized, is necessary now to do what I am calling wake work as aspiration, that keeping breath in the Black body? I’ve been thinking aspiration in the complementary senses of the word: the withdrawal of fluid from the body and the taking in of foreign matter (usually fluid) into the lungs with the respiratory current, and as audible breath that accompanies or comprises a speech sound. Aspiration here, doubles, trebles in the same way that with the addition of an exclamation point, Philip transforms and breaks Zong from a proper name into Zong! That exclamation point breaks the word into song/ moan/chant/shout/breath.
— Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, pg. 109
My earliest memory is gazing up at my dad as he sang the most beautiful song while holding me in his arms inside the living room located in Glenarden, Maryland — maybe it was 1995. The chorus of the song was my name and what I didn’t know then, but I’m fully aware of now is how the sounds of black feminist being would reverberate throughout my childhood sculpting my sense of space and possibility. The soundtrack of this black feminist worlding informed all my aspirations and provided portraits of possibility that validated my craving to expand, to breathe, to improvise, to be. Christina Sharpe reminds us aspiration is the action or process of drawing breath. This week I’m remembering how black feminist technologies of care provided the rhythmic ruttier for how to use every breath to sing into being the world we need right now, now, now.
When asking Seeda School learners what their favorite black feminist technology is1, they often recall sites, situations and memories that invoke song. Whether it’s the chime of an aunties bangles coming down the stairs, the choral chatter of hair salon waiting areas, the beat that hair beads make when their wearer jumps rope or is in play mode, or our acrylic tips tapping on the table of the present waiting for a future that hasn’t happened yet but must2. Our sounds of self-actualization, our aspiration, our breath, our play, our memories of songs where the chorus is our name is the sound of seed data. Linear notes3 of possibility that informs our demands, our desire, and our code.
Seeda School is named in honor of this seed data, these programming protocols, the algorithms of aspiration singing to the tune of “c’mon now, we saved you a plate”. The song that reminds us that our breathing isn't in vain. Seeda as in the computer science concept, “database seeding” or seed data. Learn Entity Framework Core defines seed data as, “data that you populate the database with at the time it is created. You use seeding to provide initial values for lookup lists, for demo purposes, proof of concepts etc.” This school remembers the ways in which black feminist worlding has provided the initial values for liberation.
Sharpe4 has helped me reframe my beautifully discordant desire, once mistaken for the emptiness of ambition, into aspiration. She reminds me my desire to expand is rooted in my desire to make more room for my breath. In last week’s Seeda School Discovery Workshop I shared, one of the stories that often stopped me from tending to my curiosity in code was, “I’m the creative type. I’m the writer, artist, designer, and community builder. I’ll leave the coding to the technical types.” Now I let the air of curiosity fill and inform the lungs of my multidisciplinary practice, remembering I am a musical multitude embodying a song where my name is the chorus. With deep breath and deep permission to expand let’s make music with our aspiration and multiplicity. Curious about learning how to build a coding project using HTML, CSS and JavaScript? Book a 1:1 discovery call with me where we will talk about your curiosity in code, the stories that have stopped you from tending to that curiosity, and your coding goals to learn if Seeda School can help with all three. Join us in aspiring toward otherwise through code…how sweet the sound?
This question is inspired by a question Neema Githere asked me while in conversation. Their question was framed, “What is your favorite technology? (Thinking as expansively as you can about technology)”.
“The grammar of black feminist futurity that I propose here is a grammar of possibility that moves beyond a simple definition of the future tense as what will be in the future. It moves beyond the future perfect tense of that which will have happened prior to a reference point in the future. It strives for the tense of possibility that grammarians refer to as the future real conditional or that which will have had to happen. The grammar of black feminist futurity is a performance of a future that hasn’t yet happened but must.” — Campt, Tina M. “Quiet Soundings: The Grammar of Black Futurity.” Listening to Images, Duke University Press, Durham, C., 2017, p. 17.
“These expressive practices were technologies of the body, emanating from the throats, the fingers, and joints of artists who invented sonic works through the complexity of their own exquisite performing selves, through their own “resonance chambers” and felt listening that created conditions of possibility for the modern that which exceeds the modern.” — Daphne A. Brooks, Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound, “Introduction”, pg. 17
The New York Times recently published a piece on Christina Sharpe titled, “The Woman Shaping a Generation of Black Thought: Christina Sharpe is expanding the vocabulary of life in slavery’s long shadow — peeling back the meaning of familiar words and resurrecting neglected history.” It’s by Jenna Wortham and I literally can not wait to read it.