race

Keith Obadike's Blackness for Sale was an eBay page advertising the sale of his blackness. The general format of eBay includes only the basic information about the product necessary to make it desirable for purchase. An item for sale typically includes a title or name of the product, a description of its uses, a starting price, and a photograph. In the case of Blackness for Sale, Obadike abided by this same format but replaces the description with a litany of pros and cons of blackness. Obadike focused on the selling points of blackness but then juxtaposed it with “warnings” of the drawbacks of owning a black identity. Although Obadike’s warnings were legitimate aspects of blackness, they were only issues of concern when inhabiting black flesh. Blackness for Sale Blackness for Sale furthered the notion that black people have been homogenized to the point where their experiences have become indistinguishable; to the outside world and the buyer, there is one black experience. Part of a person is advertised and valued much higher while systematically omitting the other elements that define their personhood. The most profitable aspect of black people is no longer their physical body but rather everything that encompasses their existence. Black culture becomes a new form of capital and the internet is where it is exchanged. Black culture can be taken from the internet without having to interact with or acknowledge the black body, thus erasing black people. Whereas before black people were only valued in capitalist societies for their physical abilities, they are now more so valued for their cultural capital.

(Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendi_%26_Keith_Obadike)

VUMA Soner honours the voices, stories and talent of people of colour in Scandinavia. It is an app created by VUMA Projects with geo-triggered immersive audio experiences. This chapter of the app contains a collection of thoughts, reflections, and conversations, remembered or spontaneous, tied to specific landmarks, buildings and areas in the city of Bergen. The authors are all living in Bergen, some speaking in Norwegian and some in English. The sounds can be accessed in six central locations through a free downloadable app, which can be combined into one long, or multiple small walks. Production of the app is supported by the City of Bergen, the Arts Council of Norway and BEK.

How to access the appTo find the app, go to an app store (Google Play or App Store) on your mobile device. Search for “VUMA Soner” and download it for free. Create an account and select the walk. The audio experiences are linked to GPS locations and will be triggered when you walk into the zone of your selected walk. If your signal is weak in some areas, you can download the walks onto your device beforehand. Just be sure to keep the GPS on.

Traveling While Black is a cinematic VR experience that immerses the viewer in the long history of restriction of movement for black Americans and the creation of safe spaces in our communities. Visit historic Ben's Chili Bowl and join patrons as they share and reflect on their experiences. Confronting the way we understand and talk about race in America, Traveling While Black highlights the urgent need to facilitate a dialogue about the challenges minority travelers still face today. (from Felix & Paul Studios' website)

Video art installation critical of the precarious, racialised, and gendered labour going on through the internet, or born-digital.

Vital to the General Public Welfare was a solo exhibition (Edward Day Gallery, Toronto, 2012) revolving around themes of language, authenticity and contingency filtered through the lens of my experience as an adopted-out Cherokee person. I have recently turned the interactive touchwork poems in Vital, a 30-minute performance using the Poetry for Excitable [Mobile] Media (P.o.E.M.M.) mobile apps as the main performance tool. The title of the show came from documents filed in a 1964 Louisiana court case seeking to ascertain an adopted child’s racial classification. The judge claimed that the proper identification of the child’s race was “vital to the general public welfare”; in other words, whichever way the child was classified, a wrong classification would endanger the fundamental fabric of White culture. The now-hyberbolic seeming claim strikes me as a powerful metaphor for any conversations we have not only about racial classification but also about any number of other issues that some group or another feels is central to their definition of a well-functioning society. All of the works performed in Vital engage the question of how we talk to one another, how we locate ourselves in wider cultural geographies, how we authenticate ourselves against our own expectations and that of others, and how matters that are once seen as so vital – so essential – can later be regarded as contingent. The performance will consist of augmented readings, whereby I manipulate the P.o.E.M.M. app while performing the text of the poem. I will also be using several text-based apps by different creators (with permission!) I use an iPad connected wirelessly to an AppleTV (via Airplay using WiFi), which then pumps HD video via HDMI to a projector. This allows me to move freely around the stage while operating the pad. (Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

This public research/community project explores the use of database narrative in the process of “counter-storytelling” using oral history and Critical Race Theory (CRT) in a public history touch-table project. The research is based on a case study of an ongoing digital humanities project at the historic Kimball African American War Memorial Building, built by black veterans of WWI in 1928 in the southern coalfields of West Virginia. The Kimball Project’s aim has been to further develop the significance of the renovated Kimball African American Memorial, which was once a vibrant center of local community life for all ethnicities and races. A central goal of the project is to create an identity as a national treasure and unique destination for historical tourism through the innovative use of digital information technology. One of the objectives of the project has been to involve the community in telling their own historical narratives using iPhone and iPod-based mobile journalism tools for incorporation into the Memorial’s exhibits, digital content, and to upload these stories to the Memorial website. The focus of this presentation is the research, development and design of an interactive, database narrative-driven touch table experience physically located in the Memorial’s exhibition space, as well as an interactive website. The database narrative uses a rare book discovered in the process of research and collection of artifacts and documents – a book of social protest poetry, entitled War Poems, written by two young black women, sisters Ada Tessabell Peters (age 18) and Ethel Pauline Peters (age 17) while students at the West Virginia Negro Collegiate Institute in 1919. The research and project present a paradigm shift in theory and practice for cultural workers engaged in mining invisible voices of the “Other” vis–à–vis “majoritarian” representations of race in digitally interactive public histories. (Source: author's abstract)