The Declaration of Seeda Studio
The Sankofa Bird Becomes the Sankofa Bug
“One is not born, but rather becomes, a body. And one is not born, but rather becomes, a glitch. The glitch-becoming process, a consensual diaspora toward multiplicity that arms us as tools, carries us as devices, sustains us as technology, while urging us to persist, survive, stay alive.”
— Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020), pg. 145
Soft, Where? A Homecoming
What does it mean to serve inside the fire that brings the water?
Since the beginning of the year I have been desiring a return to code. Since the beginning of the year I have been resisting the call of this homecoming. Reminding myself how much work, how many years, how many tears it took to begin to heal from the trauma of engaging with the tech industry as a black queer woman. Engaging inside the spaces that call her a unicorn and pay her to twirl. Spaces that pay her to romanticize being chosen so other black and brown folks may also sign up to put their psyches, bodies, breath on the line for neoliberal wet dreams of progress and techno-determinist forms of domination and surveillance capitalism. Spaces that pay her to sing on stages about diversity and inclusion then welcome her back to work the next day where she is still the only one. The trauma of engaging in spaces where you are encouraged to be grateful for being the only one. We will never innovate our way out of white supremacy1, stabilizing black codes2 and maintaining algorithms of oppression3. Fuck that, I’m never going back.
I refused and refused and code kept calling. Then I remembered my entry into code was always a spiritual one. Seeded inside a childhood curiosity unfolding on MySpace and eventually returning in 2018 when my car breaks down on the side of the road. I had been running around DC trying to figure out my next move. I knew it had to do with code and I knew I had hit a wall trying to teach myself. Every engineer I met kept suggesting coding bootcamps I couldn’t afford. In 2018 my car broke down and I found myself on the Metro everyday, occasionally looking up from my book. One day I noticed an ad for a new coding bootcamp coming to the city. I applied anyway, knowing I couldn’t afford the $15,000 price tag. I passed the cultural interview anyway. I passed the technical interview anyway. I got a full scholarship anyway. Thank god my car breaks down in 2018, because I go on to teach software engineering which eventually brings the interdisciplinary threads of my entire practice together.
“We fail to function for a machine that was not built for us. We refuse the rhetoric of “inclusion” and will not wait for this world to love us, to understand us, to make space for us. We will take up space, and break this world, making new ones.”
— Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020), pg. 145
Through building worlds on the web I began to braid the threads of the art and politics magazine, the clothing line, the creative community organizing and the spiritual foundation of my childhood. What to do with the inheritance of both Southern Baptist and Hoodoo traditions is a question that found answers with code as a collaborator. Compile, loop, iterate, seed data, server, recursion, node, call a function, invoke a function, hoist, scope, variable, declare, TypeError, SyntaxError. The clarity of the language borrowed by this craft unlocked something in my imagination about what it means to be black and woman and queer and glitch. Forever an object of service and forever invisibly visible, an undeclared variable, a bug in the program that can corrupt your code because it’s so hard to locate. This function kept calling me back4.
Service Function Chaining in the Network Architecture of Black Feminism
So here I am, finding myself back at the altar of code. Answering the call once more, a call much more ancient than the tech industry. Inside Seeda School I have met the Audre Lordes, Octavia Butlers, Toni Cade Bambaras, bell hooks, June Jordans of our time. I have met the ancestors whose names history lost track of. Undeclared variables. Inside the Treehouse we have been spending time with our ancestors on walking trails, in front of our altars, in our prayers, in our art practices — everything we do, we do together so I have been inside this practice as well. An assignment that keeps coming through is creating spaces of softness, ease, accountability, tenderness and collaboration for the black feminists we will thank 50, 70, 100 years from now. How might we make sure they have all the tools and resources they need while their breath is still in their lungs, now, now, now? Not paying homage only after their faces and quotes are invoked on the walls of universities and non-profits in their death.
“We throw shade by existing in the world, by showing up and not only surviving, but truly, fully, living. We practice the future in the now, testing out alternatives of being. We openly, honestly consider together how to be strategically visible, when visibility is radically necessary.”
— Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020), pg. 146
What does service function chaining look like inside the network architecture of black feminism? How do we balance the load5 of desire and transformation across non-linear time, suspended between all who came before and those inevitable ones that will come after. Maybe “before” and “after” are misnomers. Way “before” answering this call I formally incorporated, no, declared the variable of Seeda School as Seeda Studio LLC. Before the full scope of vision was hoisted into clear view. Now I can see what it was all for. Now I can see Seeda Studio’s
Graphic design team
Photography team
Videography team
Marketing team
Podcasting team
Web development team
Learning experience design team
Business strategy team
All rooted in black feminist pedagogies. All in service to the undeclared variables who understand the radical necessity of both visibility and marronage. The black feminists we usually invoke only after they’re gone. The functions we only call on when we need something instead of using our imaginations to serve them, now. I am visioning my return to code from inside Seeda Studio, a space dedicated to serving black feminists with a desire to build worlds on the web.
Crafting Care: The Spiritual Poetics of Design, Computation and Abolition
“We are encrypted: how we are coded is not meant to be easily read. We recognize that the care-full reading of others is an exercise of trust, intimacy, belonging, homecoming. We reject the conflation of legibility and humanity. Our unreadable bodies are a necessary disruption. Our unreadable bodies can render us invisible and hypervisible at the same time. As a response to this, we work together to create secure passageways both on-and offline to travel, conspire, collaborate.”
— Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020), pg. 147
Ahead of sharing the vision of Seeda Studio with you I returned to, “Crafting Care: The Spiritual Poetics of Design, Computation and Abolition”6. The research project that started it all. Inside the laboratory of “Crafting Care” I researched the following themes:
Polycultural Design: Fractal Framing and Visualizing the Archive
Tree Ring Shout: Data Encoded Plant DNA and the Black Water
Seed Data: The Archive, Non-linear Narrative, and Collective Memory
Cloth Cryptography: Weaving Document and Grid As Language Making or Cartography
Black Feminist Labor and Technology: Computation, Automation, and Fugitive Practice
All themes that would go on to inform the worldbuilding project of Seeda School. Within the last year Seeda School has served over 150 members through the worldbuilding framework seeded by “Crafting Care”. Recently, one of those members was Jordan Martin, who alongside their collaborator Nathalie von Veh, were doulas to my own desire when Seeda was just a seed — eventually becoming a syllabus, becoming a press, becoming a school, becoming a studio for black feminist worldbuilders.
The recursive loops continue…
Seeing my grandmother's sister, my Aunt Ann, on the “Crafting Care” research presentation Zoom call is still more than enough to bring me to an abundance of tears. Overflowing with gratitude for the way my dreams thrust me into conviction, into a courageous love I could never muster on my own. Desire is the fire that brings the water. An erotic energy that compels you to burn all the fear that stands between you and the force of love so you might find flow. So we might find home in our wholeness, which is to say our wildness. So we might create secure passageways both on-and offline to travel, conspire, collaborate.
The Sankofa Bird Becomes A Sankofa Bug
Inside this recursive loop of ancestral communion the job title that keeps coming up is “desire doula”. It’s a title I’ve been trying on for the last few weeks and it’s the only title that feels worthy of my breath and power — power that was always meant to be shared. But what does it mean to be a desire doula? And if our gifts were given to us so we can circulate and give them back, across generations, how do we calibrate and modulate the power we give away and the power we preserve to keep us going over the expanse of our lifetimes? This is the web work7 I want to investigate with you moving forward.
I joked with my literary agent a couple weeks ago that black feminism needs art directors. The black feminists need headshots, we need graphics, we need websites, we need platform portals that reflect the potency of our transformative power. We need entire photography, cinematography and technology studios that recognize the time to fully resource, platform and support this irresistible work is now. I want to see us in front of the lights, in front of the cameras, on stages holding and sharing mics. I want to see black feminism destabilize the mainstream, the status quo, and pop culture. I want to see abolition, disability justice and a radical care ethic permanently corrupt the colonial imaginations of us all. I want to see fully declared variables throwing bugs in every system designed for our death.
📰 Seeda School News
✨ Seeda Studio is now open! Where your power syncs up with your portals. Seeda Studio is a black feminist design studio specializing in crafting transformative learning experiences and income generating worlds on the web.
The Implementation Accelerator is a brand new offering inside Seeda Studio. An all-in-one design, strategy and implementation service that creates pathways of ease for worldbuilders like you, ready to work 1:1 over the next 3 months on creating the framework, sales page and sales system for the flagship offer emerging from your creative business ecosystem. There are 5 seats available. Applications are open from now until September 13th. I can’t wait to build new worlds on the web with you.
“We Will Not Innovate Our Way Out Of White Supremacy: A letter to my 19 year old self”, written and read for the occasion of the first Cultivate Fellowship, presented by Ginkgo Bioworks, aimed at increasing Black STEM representation. The Cultivate Fellows were a group of 19-21 year olds pursuing majors in STEM. I wrote and performed a live reading of this essay in response to the question “Imagine you were one of the students here. What lessons would you give to your younger self now?”
Black Codes restricted black people's right to own property, conduct business, buy and lease land, and move freely through public spaces. A central element of the Black Codes were vagrancy laws. States criminalized men who were out of work, or who were not working at a job whites recognized. (Source: Wikipedia) For black codes in the French Empire, see Code Noir.
Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Umoja Noble
In computer programming, a callback is a function that is stored as data (a reference) and designed to be called by another function – often back to the original abstraction layer. (Source: Wikipedia)
In computing, load balancing is the process of distributing a set of tasks over a set of resources (computing units), with the aim of making their overall processing more efficient. Load balancing can optimize response time and avoid unevenly overloading some compute nodes while other compute nodes are left idle. (Source: Wikipedia)
“Crafting Care: The Spiritual Poetics of Design, Computation and Abolition” (2021) presented by Ayana Zaire Cotton with support from the Wherewithal Research Grant organized by Washington Project for the Arts. Watch the video of me presenting the research here and check out the Are.na channel where I compiled the research here.
Expanding the Web: Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, Ayana Zaire Cotton, and
in conversation. “Expanding the Web” was a virtual event surrounding and inspired by we web keepers, ’s newspaper publication published this past fall by Printed Matter on the occasion of their window exhibition of the same name at Printed Matter / St Marks. This work was recently invoked in “W is for Web” written by Ravon Ruffin Feliz and published by New Terms and Conditions.
❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥