The Tenor of Dark Matter
Don’t want my song to be remembered Because art history needed New flashy flesh The tenor of Dark matter Prima Materia Premium Material A tincture stored on the shelves of Private collections of Black hope Drops under your tongue Where river vein water Is red and the stars are Pimples the taste of pussy Prophesizing the fate of the species She wove worlds They nailed her universe to the wall Asked her to decode the song So they could sing along To her flashy flesh The tenor of dark matter
Soft, where?
How might we refuse proximity and acknowledgment from inside the capitalist enclosures and industrial imaginaries of STEM and remember the work is ancestral, engaging relational databases of belonging pre-dating what we might call modern computing. Resisting the use of the word algorithm to draw connections to the clout of surveillance capitalism, instead, might we remember this practice is about a dance of data processing that is simultaneously performative, riotous, and spiritual — engaging the code of our biocultural formulation of being. We are collectively interrogating and expanding what Denise Ferreira da Silva calls “difference without separability”1 while asking what is our species for?
Who do we call a technologist and why do we give a fuck?
In my rush to call weavers software engineers, describe quilters as data scientists and announce writers as biotechnologists, who am I trying to make their work more legible and valuable to? What if in directing the STEM gaze toward these queer, ancestral, and indigenous practices of data stewardship and worlding we are sabotaging the archive altogether? What happened when we called the Gee's Bend quilters technologists and took their quilts off the beds of their families and put them on the walls of the Whitney2?
What if the work isn’t to decolonize STEM but to keep the quilts on the beds?
How might we continue our tradition of open source making in our shared programming language where improvisation acts as a sort of obfuscation for maintaining the integrity of the archive — keeping the quilt on the bed and the pot on the altar. As apocalypse powered by technology creeps3 and hopeful speculation about Black futures acts as the only lubricant to make the all the grating death more bearable, Ron Eglash’s research4 reminds us of the artful arithmetic embedded in the artifacts the museum stole. What do we lose in our pursuit of proximity to knowledge systems that just discovered algorithms two seconds ago while we’ve been wearing them in our hair since before the word human was invented? Sojourner Truth’s wisdom5 opens a door, “I sell the shadow to support the substance”. If we must toss the machine a shadow, let’s get clear on the substance…then ghost6.
Weaving cryptographic cotton to obstruct the STEM gaze, we snack on the bite-size history of modern computing and let the millennia old data backed up in clay make any recent ways of knowing infinity more slippery. The metabolized memory in our making are maps for future ancestors, our bodies are interfaces performing legibility for only those who have the encryption key. In what ways can the language of modern computing further illuminate the portal to escaping the linearity of history? The portal that was there all along.
As I think through Sylvia Wynter’s and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s work around how Black feminism destabilizes the colonial invention of the human as separate from "nature", I reflect on the Black aesthetic tradition of re-appropriation, improvisation, collage, recursion etc. and ask what it might mean to study7 (suffer-struggle-speculate) collaboratively with my computer toward a Black feminist erosion of the human as defined by the white imaginary. Instead of rushing to the shade of STEM’s white proximity, what if we experimented with the computing power embedded in our flowering abstraction to program new modes of being altogether. Where the body was always an interface, cotton was data before currency, the loom was a computer before a screen, and cloth was a server predating AWS.
In a rush toward proximity to the neoliberalist tech wave that emerged in the 2000s, I introduced software engineering into my creative practice in 2018. Fastforward (or backward) to today, a central question in the work is how the plasticity8 of Black womanhood and the ecology of Black feminism might collaborate with computation to remember and engineer new modes of being beyond the colonial conception of the human. Viral, generative, uncollectable, and utterly wild — the tenor of dark matter — holding the shadow and the substance in both hands.
On Difference Without Separability, text by Denise Ferreira da Silva for the catalogue of the 32a São Paulo Art Biennial, Incerteza viva (Living Uncertainty)
The Quilts of Gee's Bend, Whitney Museum, Nov 21, 2002–Mar 9, 2003
Apocalypse Creep, This American Life, February 11, 2022
African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design, Ron Eglash, Rutgers University Press; 1st edition, March 1, 1999
"I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance", Sojourner Truth, MET Museum, 1864
Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, Legacy Russell, Verso Books, September 2020
Fred Moten with Stefano Harney in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, pg. 110
Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, NYU Press, May 2020