 So, hello everyone. I wanted to welcome you back from lunch for the evening, for the afternoon and the evening of this lovely conference workshop. My name is Anupama Rao. I am a historian and an anthropologist who works on South Asia, on India in particular. I'm also the Associate Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. And this has some bearing on why and how I'm here today. Both Laura and Dare in the Center for Spatial Research have kind of pulled me a textually trained, I guess, historian and somebody who does some amount of ethnographic field work into this kind of enchanting world of urban humanities and spatial mapping and data visualization and have taught me a lot about thinking, about questions of, I think, history, theory and politics in really different ways because of the kind of interface and the kinds of questions that they've been asking. So I really want to thank them for pulling me into this world. I am a neo-fight but I think a somewhat enthusiastic traveler. I also wanted to just take a chance to think a little bit about some of the questions and concerns of the morning and especially the wonderful keynote that we had by Wendy Chun and how that might also stage some of our conversations for the rest of the day. And so I just wanted to throw a couple of things out there very quickly. One is that it seems to me that we've been thinking about the question of history, of theory and politics in very different yet interconnected ways throughout the day. This also has some bearing on the way that we think about questions of description, of analytics and of methodology and people have come into these questions with different levels of emphasis. But the other thing that people seem to be really interested in thinking about is the ways in which spatial unevenness is a material manifestation of capital, of capital's work, whether we think of it as colonial, post-colonial or neoliberal. And as part of this, one of the things that I've heard a lot is a kind of binary and or a dialectic and or an overcoming. I don't know what kinds of terms you want to use for this, but a way of thinking about the relationship between system and structure on the one hand and then questions of informality, of defacement, of improvisation, resilience. I didn't hear the word resistance but perhaps that too. And the political question of what all this means, how we think about making do on the one hand with the systems that we inherit and inhabit and then the questions of really profound and or minute change that's possible within those spaces. For myself as well, I just want to throw this out as a kind of question or a concern. And this really has to do with the relationship, speaking of spatial unevenness, the relationship between the global north and the global south. And it seems to me that it's, I'm not very clear yet whether we think of the global south as merely a case, whether it's a diagnostic, whether it's a dystopia, whether it actually contains lessons and parables for the world that we inhabit increasingly in the global north. But I don't think that the relationship between the global south and the global north is one of equivalence. But there's been a way in which there's been a kind of politics of comparison that I want to ask about and about historical comparison. So are we seeing a moment of primitive accumulation? Of a moment of a kind of, you know, originary violence? Is this a reset? How do we really think the histories of the present? It seems to me with some more attention to the world of the global south. This is my own concern, but this is just to put this out there for the rest of the day. And I want to use that as a way to introduce this panel, which is going to be focused on the question of history, of other spaces, of the archive, of memory, documentation and installation. And I'm going to quickly introduce our three speakers for the afternoon. So the first, and this will be in the order, I think, of their presentations as well. The first is Robert Gerard Petrusco, who is a cartographer and composer who's based in Somerville, Massachusetts. His work explores contemporary technologies of measurement, of simulation and visualization, and their relationship to the production of space. He's an assistant professor of architecture and landscape architecture at Harvard's GSD. The next is Nontisa Kellehlo Mutiti, who is a Zimbabwean-born interdisciplinary artist and educator. He was trained at Zimbabwe's Institute of Digital Arts and also has an MFA from the Yale School of Art. Recently, she's been a resident artist at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit. And in 2015, she was awarded the Joan Mitchell Foundation Emerging Artist Grant in its inaugural year. And like all the people on our panel, she has participated in many shows, curated many of them, and has got an extensive body of work. She produces project-based works as a founder member of the Black Chalk and Company Collective and with Tinashe Mushakavan Shoo, which is a collective of writers, artists, curators and educators. And then Simone Brown is in the Department of Sociology at the University of Austin. She's also the associate professor in the Department of African and African diaspora studies. Her first book, Dark Matters, on the Surveillance of Blackness, examines surveillance with a focus on transatlantic slavery, biometric technologies, branding, airports and creative texts. She's an executive member of Hashtag and also a member of Deep Lab, which is a feminist collaborative. So please welcome all of our speakers and it's really great to be here and to introduce you all. Good afternoon. I'm glad that I'm not directly following our keynote, that I'm following lunch. Lunch is a pretty good opening act I've found in the past. So I do just want to mention how inspiring I found all of the morning presentations. And I'd like to thank Laura and Der for having me here to be part of this. And Anu for that fantastic introduction. On receiving Laura's invitation to speak at a conference sponsored by the Andrew Mellon Foundation on the topic of ways of knowing cities, it seemed like a good opportunity to present an exhibition project that was part of the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative. This exhibition was part of a four-year project that was done in collaboration amongst numerous departments at Harvard on a project called Reconceptualizing the Urban. The PIs for this project were Urban Historian Eve Blau and Julie Buckler, a professor of Slavic languages. And it was imagined as a collaboration between the Graduate School of Design and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences there. So the desire was to see what would happen if we treated the topic of urbanism through the lenses of design and various humanities. There were several courses that were developed, seminars and research courses that had sort of fieldwork and field studies. There were symposia lecture series and a number of workshops on sort of collaborative methodologies. One of which I led on mapping for people in the humanities. The sort of focus on urbanity used for portal cities to organize the work or the collaborative work for all the people involved with the project. And by focusing on these cities, we wanted to kind of highlight the differences in methodologies that different types of scholars use. And specifically looked at what happened when we combined designers with experts in urban studies, historians, people from COMPLET, film studies, media studies and all the rest of it. As my collaborator, Eve Blau, often says of the project, that the city is a terrific site for collaborative work because no one discipline owns the city as a site of research. Each brings to their work a series of blind spots that a collaborative or heterodox form of research can help to address. The final portion of the initiative was an exhibition project co-curated by Eve and myself that would travel to the four portal cities with the original goal of sort of presenting the results of the research on these cities that have been accumulated over the four years. And with this project, it was sort of assumed that this research by being kind of aggregated around four cities would somehow be commensurable. And specifically that we would be able to exhibit the work that was produced in the courses and the lectures and the symposia in sort of a legible or comprehensive fashion. However, for months in planning that, when the topic of the exhibition would come up in all of our meetings, all eyes would turn towards me and I could only shrug because it wasn't quite clear to me exactly how all of this material would come together. And specifically that given that the exhibition was going to be mounted from within the design discipline, how is it that we could use kind of tools of representation that designers are most accustomed to using without sort of falling into one of the blind spots that are sort of part of our discipline when we're looking at urban questions. So what we decided to do instead was focus on the visual media that was generated as part of the larger Mellon project. And take all of this media, extract it from the research projects that had used this media or extract it from the projects that had generated it and see if there was new types of storytelling about the cities that could be told through the media that was generated across the four year project. So it wasn't simply telling the stories of like various research papers that were generated. It was taking all of the material that had sort of come out of these different settings, putting them into a large repository and then asking the experts from the various disciplines focus on these cities. What types of new stories could be told when we combined all of the visual media that was kind of generated across the disciplines. We ended up deciding on a sort of form of spatial montage through which a multidisciplinary audience might interpret the city differently and by combining this material as a form of sort of spatial temporal cartography. So my goal is to just show you some of the work that came out of this by focusing on the exhibition itself. But before I do that, I kind of want to engage in a cartographic preamble. So returning to the claim that each discipline has its own blind spots. As I said before, we wanted to not ensnare the research cities with our own blind spots from design. We had to ask ourselves the question like what was it that we uniquely brought to the exhibition of all of this work. So we looked at the set of representational or cartographic practices within design and within the adjacent field of geography, specifically how spaces spoken of in geography, that pointed most readily to open interpretations, those kind of forms of representation that engaged multiple processes and meanings of a site. Here I'm showing, I'm sure a number of you know this, but here I'm showing an old Dilernska video mapping of Normandy from the 1994 project Back to the Front. David Harvey, the geographer, in his paper Space as a Keyword, gives us the term relational space which seemed especially apt for the project that we were developing. And for Harvey, the relational view of space holds that there is no such thing as a space outside of the processes that define it. And we were hoping that the application of this definition to urban space is somewhat self-evident and that we could move on to sort of cartographic and sort of data-driven visualizations of cities with this idea of kind of relational space in mind. To continue with Harvey, quote, an event or a thing at a point in space cannot be understood by appeal to what exists only at that point. It depends upon a wide variety of desperate influences swirling over space in the past, present and future, and concentrating and congealing at a certain point to define the nature of that point. Okay, there are certain topics such as the political role of collective memories in urban processes that can only be approached this way. And Harvey says that he could not box political or collective memories in some absolute space and clearly situate them on the map. He asked himself the question, what does Tiananmen Square or Ground Zero mean, to which his answer was that he could only seek an answer in relational terms. And though he's not speaking about representation in sort of a more conventional material sense that we would think of within architecture and the larger design disciplines, this idea of processes defining what a site was was especially inspiring for us. In response to those words that we might ask, how do we draw this? And it's sort of canonical text in mapping. James Corner's Agency of Mapping from 1999 contains a line of thought similar to Harvey's relational space that we drew upon. And I'm feeling maybe there's a bit of nostalgia embedded in my presentation here because I'm showing mid-90s Dillernesca video renderings while talking about James Corner's Agency of Mapping. So perhaps I'm just early to the party of the next wave of nostalgia in the design disciplines, maybe the mid-90s will be back soon. But working from Corner's paper, he says that there's an infinitely open, rhizomatic nature of mapping, as opposed to mere tracing, that affords many diverse entryways, exits, and lines of flight, each of which allows for a plural... Many, many readings, uses and effects. So mapping in this relational way structures an open-ended series of relationships that must remain open. So through the resultant work, we produced a series of what appear to be cartographic collages. The logic of collage or of simply combining fragments was not our goal. Again, following the language of Corner, we were after a more systematic montage where multiple and independent layers are incorporated as a synthetic composite. And that the resultant maps might not represent any one thing at all, and were hopefully open to multiple interpretations, and specifically multiple interpretations from different disciplinary backgrounds. To return to the Dilerinsk Affidio image that I have here, I actually feel this is a pretty great precedent for some of the ideas that we are hoping to address in the animations that you're going to see soon. In this project, they're sort of arguing that the beaches of Normandy are reaffirmed and reproduced over time through a series of events. The first militaristic campaign with all of the representations that go along with that. The second sort of cinematic representations that attempt to restage the events on the beach of Normandy during D-Day. And then lastly, the touristic version of the site where tourists visit Normandy with an obsession for the first, where the first boot of an American soldier hit the ground where the first beachhead was established. And that through all of these kind of different ways of approaching this site that Normandy as a place evolves over time. It has multiple meanings and there's multiple types of representational media that goes along with that. So with that in mind, we started to produce a series of overlays that will become animated and start to build up sort of spatial narratives around each of the cities that I mentioned above. So we'll be looking at some of these in more detail in just a moment. As I mentioned before, there were four cities used to structure the Mellon Project. These were Berlin, Boston, Istanbul, and Mumbai. And for the exhibition, we developed three of these sort of large relational space animated cartographic representations. We didn't come up with a buzzword for it, so that's all one word with hyphens in between it. Maybe it should be in German. But there we had three narratives for each of the cities. And along with each narrative... Oh, sorry. Okay. Yeah, I'm happy to step back if I'm going through this a little too quickly. Around each of the narratives there was a sort of structure to this where each portal had a research director and then a series of students that I sort of coordinated in order to help them produce these cartographic narratives. As I mentioned before, Eve and I were the ones sort of credited as co-curators. But it was part of that much larger team that I showed earlier and also with the collaboration of Haller-Yoon architecture for the development of the actual physical pieces you'll see in the exhibition and then working closely with one of our recent graduates, Scott Smith, on the production of the animated content. Okay, so I'm going to focus on Berlin. And I realize this is perhaps contradictory with what I said earlier about open interpretation. I'm actually going to just step us through one of the narratives and tell you what we were intending with it. But hopefully still you can see the potential for reading it in multiple ways from different disciplines. Okay, so working with a huge repository of archival material in the city, we geo-referenced a bunch of information together in order to build up a story about the plans that were combined in order to produce the fabric of Berlin that we see in the mid-1800s, while also acknowledging the numerous plans that were never adopted. So in the kind of plans that we associate with Berlin as it actually existed, there were several other plans at all points in time that were discarded, so other possible futures that show up in the books and can be sort of spatialized against the city as it's coming together, but then disappear quite literally from the map. For this narrative, we specifically looked at the Louis-Stadt neighborhood and how that became a prototype or what the team called an experimental ground that went on to inform the rest of the structure of Berlin through the idea of the Berlin block. So here we're working with archival material that show illustrations and landscape drawings of the Kreuzberg Hill, which ultimately became the site of the early Louis-Stadt canal, and it's through the canal that much of the city building in the mid-1800s occurred. So we're going to see the canal here. The canal was developed specifically to give access to extraction sites that were far outside of the city, so the materials for building the blocks and the various factories in Louis-Stadt could be established. We see here that early mechanical techniques of dredging were challenged by local workers, and there was a series of riots around it and a series of protests. Of course, all of this history gets sort of erased from the standard forms of representation that designers use in order to talk about the history of urban form developing in the area, and this ultimately is the figure of the canal, and those of you who know Berlin will know this figure. It's now a park. The canal is no longer present in that way. Now, the canal produced a particular scale of blocks around it where there was an old block typology and a new block typology. And combining these with the sort of historical codes and the building codes of the mid-1800s, we highlighted the way that the building footprints used in the blocks used to populate the old block, but, however, in the new block form in the Louis-Stadt area, there became this new evacuated center, and that's crucial for how this area developed in terms of industry, because the interior of that block was undefined, it was unzoned, and was left open to a lot of improvisational programs being embedded within it. So to pick up some of the language earlier, and we're going to see that in a second, I'm just going to skip ahead a little bit here. So within the blocks, we had schools and schoolyards started to emerge. There was military activity, so they would do training procedures there. And then types of industry started to emerge. I'm going to skip ahead a little bit here. Where first, a nascent toy industry showed up in the interiors of the blocks, and it became a large export district for Berlin. Now after the toys, there was a series of innovations in aviation that showed up. I'm going to let this play out for a second. Okay, so this develops in aviation ultimately resulted in the building of parts for the German Air Force and military planes, and then ultimately the armament industry. So munitions were starting to be factories for munitions were established in the interiors of this block. So here we can see from the development of the canal and a particular block size, it created the footprint within which a series of informal industries could get plugged into the plan of Germany. Now this informs the Hobrecht plan of 1862, which is often discussed as sort of the beginning of the modern plan for Berlin. And yet the sort of precursors to the Hobrecht plan, according to Eve and her research, those precursors are not really discussed, and the role that Louisenstadt played as kind of the template that gets rolled out, the test site or the test bed for the rest of the city. Now given these informal industries that show up in the block during World War II, the Allies bombed this area pretty heavily because they wanted to disrupt the industry that resulted in the creation of airplanes and munitions. Now working with a series of historical maps of building footprints, we could, an aerial imagery, we could construct a composite map that showed the before and after of the city, actually highlighting the building footprints that were left after the bombing. And so we can see large swaths of area that have been removed from the city here. And then Louisenstadt actually contains part of the border between the Allies in the Russian sector in the post-war era. Now there were a series of plans for the redevelopment of the area, but then the Berlin Wall cut directly through this section. And here we composited together numerous media types that looked specifically at the Louisenstadt area and how it showed up in movies and in photographs at the time. Now I'm going to skip ahead a little quickly through some of this because I am at the end of my time here. What's interesting about the next era is that after the wall cuts through the neighborhood, there's a number of urban proposals for redeveloping the area. And we notice that proposals that come from the west, they imagine the wall is something that's always going to be present. So even though these were urban plans that were supposed to project 30, 40, 50 years into the future of Berlin, the wall itself is taken as a given. With these plans kind of in mind, there was a large amount of demolition that happened through the 70s. And to run counter to this demolition, there was a very active culture of squatting and artist communities that located themselves here. And they were able to push back on the demolition. And they created a series of counter maps or maps about where their squats were and the territory that they were claiming in Berlin against the desire to knock most of it down out of the interest of these large scale urban plans. Now the squatters end up rehabilitating a number of the blocks. And we can see here we're coming to the map in one second. What's sort of crucial about this is that in their rehabilitation, they prepare the ground for a later stage of real estate speculation where the parts of the neighborhood that they specifically redevelop on their own behalf become the sites that developers want to redevelop along the means of producing profit. So here we'll see their maps. And then we reference this against a map of all the buildings that had been rehabilitated by developers rather than squatters. Okay, so there's their space, excuse me. And then those are the buildings that were ultimately redeveloped by other developers, not the squatters in the community. Okay, so now this part of town has become sort of a center for branding of what the next wave of Berlin should be from the standpoint of economic development and real estate development. And given that the way that the site has evolved, we thought this kind of collage of media would show the sort of various moments of contention or the contingencies that kind of came together in order to produce this one small section of the city and how that became sort of taken up at different moments, one through the Hobrick plan to produce larger scale block fabric in Berlin, but then also now in the contemporary moment through all of these representations of sort of development literature that Louise and Schrader, Kreuzberg, has become sort of the model for where they think the sort of future of what they're calling sort of safe or cautious development. So we developed a number of narratives in this way for all of the cities that try to pull together the media to tell the stories in this way that show sort of competing voices in multiple processes at work in order to kind of uncover a different history of the present for each of these blocks. There's a bit more here, but I've gone over, so thank you very much. Hi, afternoon everyone. Thank you so much, Flora, for the invitation. I'm really happy to join you here at Columbia University. I've been at GSAP before as a visiting critic in Mario Gooden's Global Africa lab classes, and it's wonderful to present amongst all the other wonderful speakers and just share my ideas, and I hope there'll be one for conversation between us after this. I have some navigating online to do, so I'm just pulling out the mouse and the keypad here, and I'm watching my time, and you'll see my timekeeping mechanism later on. So here we are. I'm looking at you, and it's interesting to think about Wendy's talk, thinking about likeness and sort of moving together or running, fleeing a place to try to stay with kin. I find myself in the United States. I came here to study, and leaving home brought me to desire to find my kinfolk, to find spaces where I could see myself reflected, and in a way a lot of my work is to do with this. It's biographical. It's about mapping spaces, about locating spaces where I can see a repetition, a restaging, a redrawing of spaces like those I find at home. But the goal is not to disappear in these spaces, and the people that I find in these spaces are not exactly like me. We don't have identical backgrounds. We don't look exactly the same. We don't have the exact same names, but there is a way that there is some blending where some of the edges do fall into each other, where there are connections. There are also clear distinctions and nuances that talk about difference and those things play out in transactions. These images here are from an excerpt from a video piece I did with D'Adi Douza, a sound artist, and the piece is called Pain Revisited. The audio at the beginning of this piece is taken from her time in Johannesburg, South Africa on Study Abroad. She was a student at NYU, and there's a girls hostel doing initiation for the young women there, and they're learning to chant these slogans that are sort of around the identity of their hostel. I really love to think about these spaces which are full of women, where women's voices can really resonate out, ring out, where women are teaching each other, sharing where there's this repetition, build and build and builds. It's also interesting to think about accumulation and oneness, unity, also accumulation and sort of density. A lot of my work is dealing with this idea of an insider and outsider conversation, so I'm going into these spaces like African hair braiding salons in New York City and London, the spaces that I visit, and knowing full well that they are people that identify with these spaces and other people that just walk past them. Here's me looking back at you again more with a kind of a side-eye. The insider idea is very important to me. I'm interested in different layers of legibility. I'm interested in what you hear from the accumulated voices, how they appear as one singular image, oftentimes to people, and who is able to read the ages of the space, the ages of individuals, the ages of the different cultures represented. I'm also interested in myself as a player within what's happening in front of me in the spaces that I move through. I'll just read a few notes here. I'm not going to read much, but just a few notes that I've written to sort of frame some of what I'm talking about. Moving through the world, across geographic boundaries, negotiating my person between cultures, I become increasingly aware of the effect that space has on my identity. My appearance seems to be tied to a range of ideas depending on where I stand. My appearance, the way that someone or something looks, so like her disheveled appearance, or appearance, an act of performing or participating in a public event. I love this map at all intentional to cut out the rest of the world, but it's what I had on my machine. I was thinking about how to present the next project, which takes me into another space of Africa. It's quite interesting to think about how my work has evolved. Leaving Zimbabwe to come to the United States, going to the United Kingdom to visit family, and discovering how all these African hair braiding salons, African food stores existed, leading me to try to find where all these motifs keeping replicated the signs of diaspora. Traveling back and forth on the continent, mostly between Zimbabwe and South Africa, Zimbabwe is this tiny teapot country here, if you don't know it, which is no longer ruled by Robert Mugabe. This is South Africa, where the next project takes place. I have Cameroon highlighted here because I was quite fascinated to see this idea of diaspora still forming within other geographies, not just thinking about Africans abroad, which most of my work points to, but Africans within Africa, Africans from different nations, finding each other within these spaces, and oftentimes within the space of the African hair braiding salon. So here on the map we have highlighted Cameroon and Kenya, and the location of the work is here in South Africa. I just put the slide and just think about that flattening space, but here I wanted to talk a little bit more about something that you find almost anyway that a black woman has moved through this piece of tumbleweave so important in identifying who has been in that space. For me it's a way to think about black women claiming space, leaving something behind. It's never intentional. It happens accidentally, and you want to make sure that you want to distance yourself from this tumbleweave as soon as possible that it didn't drop out from your own head, but still nonetheless for me it's a symbol of power, it's a symbol of presence, it's a trace, and it's tracing back also to an identity, to a space or to a number of spaces. I also like the idea of tumbleweave as a sticky medium, you know, when designing websites you think about how to make a website sticky, how to hold people in that space, as I guess some people in here would consider themselves digital natives, as we are moving through the internet on mobile devices, on laptops, desktops. We're often clicking onto things sometimes by mistake, sometimes intentionally, and as an artist who's interested in working online, how can I make my audience invested in staying in these spaces? I'm trying to make work that I think is interesting. I'm trying to make work that I want to share. I'm accumulating all of this content and documenting, but how do I make sure that it is something that people want to spend time with and engage with? This piece is called Morning All, and it's a greeting that Mama, who owns this African hair braiding salon in Oyovo, Johannesburg, says to somebody passing by her salon, Morning All and the other person just says Morning, and me and my friend who takes me to the salon, Mili Sutando, jokingly echo what she's saying, Morning All, sort of mimicking her in loving gist. And Mama goes on to tell us that she has to say Morning All. It's a way, you know, it's just much more endearing. It's not just about saying Morning, it's about saying how are you doing? Is everyone well? Are you well? If she just says Morning, it's too European. It means I don't have time for you. You go your way, I go my own way. Thinking about diaspora, thinking about place, thinking about holding you in the space, but also embedding other things within this project, mapping the time I spent in the salon. As I'm working, as I'm accumulating and documenting, I'm thinking about time and I'm thinking about labor. As an artist, you know, those things are tied to the practice. And so how can I get the audience member, who sometimes myself, sometimes people that I know, sometimes you right now, how can I get you to invest in the work and also to understand other aspects? The idea of braiding is, you know, really, it's adornment, it's aesthetics, sometimes it's functional. But when you are not getting your hair braided, you are really on the outside. When you have gotten your hair braided, you understand that this investment of time, you understand the amount of technical skill it takes to be able to produce this work. And so Morning War is an attempt to map all of these elements onto the work. The project takes three hours to fully consume. It runs for the duration of my hair braiding appointment. And it's a transcript of the conversations that I have with Melissa Tando and Mama, who owns the salon and is also braiding my hair. As you comb through the website, you can see who is speaking, thinking again about this insider-outside relationship. As you're walking through past a salon, as you are looking at people, how do they appear? Are they a flattened group? Do they have specific identities? And what is your investment in taking time to find out more about the complexity of the individuals in the space? You do have some options, just like a customer in the African Hair Braiding Salon to be able to change the style, to choose the style that you want. And the beginning of this conversation is all about that. So something like this, I don't want it to meet at the back there. I want it to keep going up like that. So just up like this, coming up on the sides. Or then also thinking maybe it can, let me draw another head. I'm sketching this hairstyle for her. It could go up, up, up, up, up, and then it's just free. That's free. That's free. Ah, yeah. So it can go from side, up, up, up, and then this is just free. And then this one will be by the side. This one comes here like this. But we can also, we don't have to do it like that. We can just do it like this and we can do it like that. Which one do you think is better? We go on to talk about how I enjoy wearing head wraps. If I want to have extensions and there's a long, long process going on here. Some other things that are mapped on to the hair braiding so long as the actor braiding is a genealogy of ideas where those styles come from. In our conversation, Millie Sutando is talking to Mama about the last hairstyle she had which is based on a JD or JKR photograph, a phenomenal Nigerian photographer who has now passed away. So thinking about art being replicated or traditional culture being replicated, the space of African hair braiding salon for me is similar to my design studio where there's a client, there is somebody that is a practitioner and can respond to a prompt and can also iterate and create their own interpretation. Some of my favorite moments on this website are these where you have big blocks of pattern. There's actually about five or ten minutes with just pattern. And these are moments where either there is... I mean, there is talking happening in the salon. It's not just us in there. And it is moments where either myself, Mama and Millie Sutando are not speaking to each other but there are gentlemen in the background from Nigeria. The Baba is Nigerian in the space are talking about issues that I did not want to include in the transcript because it has to do with this insider-outside negotiation who is an immigrant, what are they doing to be able to be in the space of South Africa and thinking about the audience that I have on the Internet I wanted to protect that. So in a way, this project is trying to acknowledge the different audiences and trying to censor and protect some of the content that is there. There is content. It's visual. It is graphic. It is complex. But it's not spelled out for you. Just before I move on to the next project, I wanted to talk a little bit about the process of producing this work. It's documenting my experience moving through Johannesburg, through Yoval, a space where there are many immigrants living. It's an audio recording which I often do because of what it means for me to go into these spaces and photograph them and then reproduce those bodies in spaces outside of home. I feel there's some politics around that that I'm not comfortable with. This act of documenting audio, editing, transcribing and then editing is always a very tricky process. How do I present this work when there are multiple audiences who might not understand the syntax or how to translate certain annunciations that occur? I can just see here this comment that's like, yes, or when we say, ah-ah, or when someone says, yah, but it reads as yah. There's a lot of things that I cannot map onto the space and think about mapping as something that's visual but taking from what we hear. I'm still trying to deal with what is lost in translation. I think I will move past this one and talk about another project. Before I forget, I did bring up Kenya earlier. The assistant who's helping Mama braid my hair is from Nairobi, Kenya. During this conversation, she talks about herself moving from Kenya to live in Durban, South Africa and why she moved to Johannesburg. All the way through the conversation, we're all negotiating the continent. We're all talking about our experience moving through and the opening is Mama asking Mellisutando, when are you coming to Cameroon? So think about visiting each other and talking about all the different spaces that we've moved through in the continent we call home. Another project more directly about Zimbabwe, ReadingZimbabwe.com, very simple title, began when I moved to New York City last, well two summers ago, when I met colleague, Tinashe Mushakavanu, who is an author and literary critic. He's also an academic. We were sitting with a community of ours in Bed-Stuy and talking about Zimbabwe literature, which all of us besides Tinashe knew almost nothing about. We had been so separated from all these ideas that people have been writing about, from ideas that authors from Zimbabwe had pinned, not because we moved abroad, but because of what education does. Education is a system of knowledge that is presented to a community, and you can decide to point to certain locations, you can locate certain ideas, or you can leave them out. You can help people to find their way, or you can dictate a route. And Education in Zimbabwe, for the most part, is a dictated route. It's a very strict genealogy of ideas. Many of those ideas are not homegrown. We're reading books that are written by Europeans, mostly British authors. Part of it has to do with colonial heritage. And I won't talk about other reasons. So reading Zimbabwe became our passion project to try to discover more about what has been written about Zimbabwe. It became a journey back to ourselves, a way to try to see what the landscape looked like in terms of information, creative writing, commentary about a nation, a very big nation, but with only one story for the past 37 years, when I came to the United States and mentioned that I was Zimbabwe, the first thing people would say to me is like, oh, Robert Mugabe. And so how do you talk about the beauty of a space with so many conflicting identities, with so many different moments in time, so many interesting histories? We just decided to start wherever we could. Reading Zimbabwe, as you saw at the beginning, has over 1,600 titles listed on it. All of these titles are input by hand by Tinashe. It's our personal sort of fact-finding mission, but this has to change. Reading Zimbabwe needs to be a people's library. It needs to be a repository that other people can add to. We can't find everything, and we want to open this up to be a more collaborative repository. We're not just chatting books, but we're also thinking about who's been writing. And if you see here, there are 999 authors listed so far from 114 cities. So this means that Zimbabwe is being documented by many, many people, not just Zimbabweans. Oftentimes when we talk about this project, people think it's very provincial. They think the audience is just for Zimbabwe. But this project is teaching us that there are many people that are interested in Zimbabwe for different reasons. So we have all our books listed here. And again, with my practice thinking about this idea of codified languages, insider-outside patterns, there are some things that are just Tinashe and I's decisions. So some of these symbols, how we're organizing the books according to some broader themes. But we do give the audience some other categories, some sub-categories to be able to choose publications from. We're not adding an editorial to this content yet. We just want to put out as much information as we can and allow people to have access to this. But with that information also comes gaps. We had a battle at the beginning of this project thinking about what to do with books that did not have covers. But for me, some of these absences are what makes the project beautiful. The fact that we can't find everything is part of the story. We do not have the cover image because the book is out of print. This is part of the story. This is part of the story of knowledge production around Zimbabwe. Many of the books that have been produced are not being printed again. Many of them are not in circulation in Zimbabwe. Many of the books have been banned in Zimbabwe. So this project is trying to give point people a way to locate that there is information about us out there that our story is much larger. And that individuals can make their own way, make their own independent routes through what is interesting or important for them to locate about their identity as Zimbabweans or a broader community who wants to learn from our story. I'm just going to go out of here quickly. When we think about Zimbabwe, the name is coming from Great Zimbabwe. It's an 11th century kingdom based in the southeast of Mashengu. And our project is really thinking about this space. It's a space that was at its height of growing in the 11th, 12th century and now is in ruins. It's in ruins not because of lack of care, but because of archaeologists going in to excavate, to look for references of how this place was made. Great Zimbabwe is a structure that is built just brick upon brick with no mortar at all. The walls are circular and there's some conical towers that would be in the more central enclaves for important different people in the hierarchy of the leadership. But now is mainly only the great enclosure and just a lot of... You can see the traces of what should be there but what we don't have access to. We have to really imagine. So we are trying to fill those gaps and I'm hoping that we'll have more conversations with people about how to continue to build this repository, how to think about mapping different aspects of knowledge together. How can we link ideas of when books were produced to what is happening in the country? For instance, we do have data which tells you when books were produced. We can tell you where the books were produced but we also think about how people are visually thinking about Zimbabwe as these books are being printed, the motifs that are on the publications, what is an idea, how does an idea of a nation get flattened into graphics? Yeah, thank you. Hi everyone. I too sometimes contribute to the tumbleweave hashtag on Instagram so I do find it quite fun. I just bought these at the dollar store last week. It's my first time using them at a podium so hopefully it works. So thank you to the organizers. They already don't work. They're all foggy to the organizers. Sorry. Lauren, especially dear for all of the work that you did to organize and to get me here today. My talk today is a bit of a departure of sorts but one to get us to think about the role of creative texts when it comes to deliberate acts of disruption in city spaces or perhaps to riff off of Wendy's question are who are our neighbors? So this is for Nas, Malik, Brittany and Alex. If you're here with the NYPD or you're with the FBI, welcome sincerely. We expect you here. That was the brief greeting spoken by an imam at the beginning of a prayer gathering depicted in the 2015 film Nas and Malik. This welcoming to the mosque is a recognition of and perhaps a reckoning with the seeming inevitability of police surveillance and monitoring of Muslim communities. By way of, for example, the NYPD's now disbanded demographic unit, sometimes by infiltration of mosques in Muslim student groups by plainclothes cops or through the work of FBI informants or by way of create and capture. Of course, the surveillance of Muslims in the United States is not a recent formation. It occurred long before the current president, then candidate, proclaimed, quote, I want surveillance of certain mosques, okay? And you know what, we've had it before and we'll have it again, end quote. One need only look at the thousands of pages of declassified FBI documents on Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam that disclose by way of redaction and non-disclosure the extent of the state's targeted actions. In the film Nas and Malik, Malik and Nas, two black queer Muslim teenagers move in and around Brooklyn by foot, by train, by bike, all in the course of one day. Their conversations throughout the day range, skimming topics such as the densification of Brooklyn, the Quran, bystander intervention, prisons and profiling at airports. At one point, they're approached by a white, greasy-haired undercover NYPD cop who attempts to entrap the two into buying a gun. Unsuccessful, the undercover cop reports the teenagers to an FBI agent sitting in a black sedan. This is the making of create and capture. The making of informants where, allegedly, the FBI goes to length to outfit its targets with terrorist starter kits in order to manufacture and then foil terrorist plots. Malik and Nas sell various things, cat-like Catholic saint cards, lottery cards and perfume oil along Fulton Street to raise some cash. But it's their loving on each other cautiously in public that makes them illegible to the FBI. Their acts of loving on each other while moving through the city, like on the L train, are cautious because of homo-hagnistic surveillance by families, school and the public. This illegibility then renders them only legible as all the more suspicious to the FBI agent in the black sedan. I want to hold on to the Maliks and the Nazis, but not Nas and Malik, the film, for how they allow me to begin to think with how Winter calls the practice of decipherment in her essay, Rethinking Aesthetics, Notes Towards a Deciphering Practice. In this essay, Winter suggests that a deciphering practice seeks to identify not what texts and their signifying practices can be interpreted to mean, but what they can be deciphered to do. A deciphering practice is a way of getting at, as Ronaldo Walcott puts it in his discussion of that same essay, a reconstituted universalism proffered from the vantage point of the subaltern and the dispossessed. Therefore, a deciphering practice moves towards making alterable our current epistemological order, rather than merely being about film or media criticism that is unfolded into, as Winter puts it, the instituting of the figure of man and its related middle class subject. Black queer love in public makes possible an anticolonial reading of the Maliks and the Nazis in the time of, for example, ongoing stops and frists. The black site for police torture that was Chicago's Hamam Square. The FBI's proposed shared responsibility committees. The FBI's don't be a puppet website. And the Department of Homeland Security is monitoring of the Black Lives Matter movement. So I'm thinking here also of the recent, in terms of like epistemic violence and the ways in which violence can be enacted by way of knowledge production. Just earlier this week, the Boston ACLU released a report. They had gotten this information through FOIA requests that the Boston Police Department had contracted with Geofedia to do data mining analytics on Twitter, Instagram, and other social media sites for keywords such as, or terms such as Black Lives Matter, Mike Brown, Ferguson protests, Muslim Lives Matter. So with this frame, I want to turn to first the leaked unclassified for official use only FBI intelligent assessment Black identity extremists likely motivates target law enforcement offers. And then briefly to the documentary Who Streets? for guideposts that this film offers us for anti-colonial action. In this way, what follows is not a paper on the US surveillance policies with regard to the war on terror or on state and state sanctioned violence against everyday black life. Instead by foregrounding the film Nas and Malik for the sake of the Maliks and the Nazis over the film itself and by asking what this text can be deciphered to do. What I'm suggesting is that the love of black people is a liberatory practice and a strategy for confronting the gendered violences of anti-black police terror. This claim is obvious and not revelatory. For example, Black Lives Matter Toronto's list of demands and their legislative freedom school educational programs for children crafted through a trans-feminist lens or the movement for black lives platform statement where they say that we are intentional about amplifying particular experience of state and gendered violence that black queer trans and gender non-conforming women and intersex people face. By calling attention to loving black people as a liberatory practice it is to say that it's a deliberate enactment of anti-colonial politics against a colonial system in all of its makings, white supremacy, capitalist exploitation, white settler state logics of indigenous dispossession, and bureaucratic disavowal, anti-black terrorism, heteropatriarchal violence. Decolonial transformations can be fleeting sometimes. They morph and mutate. They can become reincorporated or structurally adjusted, so to speak, into new systems of violence. So I use the term anti-colonial here intentionally as doing so calls attention to the continuous groundwork and deliberate acts of disruption necessary to hold the world that we want to someday get at to its promise of liberation, a world that is something other than this colonial one. Prepared by the FBI's Domestic Terrorism Unit in August 2016 the leaked intelligent assessment brings with it the creation of a new classification, Black Identity Extremists, which the FBI defines as in a rather incomplete and confounding and probably deliberate fashion as quote, individuals who seek wholly or in part through unlawful acts of force or violence in response to perceived racism and injustice in American society, and some do so in furtherance of establishing a black homeland or autonomous black social institutions, communities or governing organizations within the United States. This document cites the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014 and that grand jury's non-indictment of the cop who killed him as the very likely impetus for the rise of this new classification. This new classification is now part of the FBI's catalog of surveillance of black life and the criminalization of black political struggle. According to the leaked document, and this is a quote the FBI assesses that it's very likely that the black identity extremist group will have the exception of unjust treatment of African-Americans and the perceived unchallenged illegitimate actions of law enforcement will inspire premeditated attacks against law enforcement over the next year. This may also lead to an increase in black identity extremist group memberships, collaboration among black identity extremist groups, or the appearance of additional violent lone offenders motivated by black identity extremist rhetoric. The FBI further assesses it is very likely additional controversial police shootings of African-Americans and the associated legal proceedings will continue to serve as drivers for violence against law enforcement. So this leaked FBI documents continues to know and by noting that the desire for physical or psychological separation is typically based on either a religious or political belief system which is sometimes formed around or includes a belief in racial superiority or supremacy. Interestingly this leaked document makes no reference to the alt-right movement or any other nomenclature that names white supremacists and white nationalist groups organizations or ideologies and their calls for an establishment of a white ethno-state. So I cite from this leaked document at length here because it's an instrument of the FBI's power to index certain black political struggle as an internal threat to the national security where this indexing becomes the state's alibi and its justification for repression of any critique or responses coming from black people when it comes to state violence against black people and their communities. So this leaked 12-page threat assessment is then that documentary evidence of the sources and methods of the state's anti-black surveillance rationalities. For example, the document states that the FBI only uses likelihood expressions and does not derive judgments for your statistical analysis. And instead what is claimed to be presented are analytical judgments. However, these analytical judgments and they go like this, the FBI assesses that and it's very likely and when it comes to perceptions of unjust treatment. So these analytical judgments work to produce that very statistical analysis where very likely is equated with highly probable at a rate of 80 to 95 percent. It's a spurious correlation indeed. But if we were to take such certainty at face value for a moment then we must read into the use of the future tense. We'll come to serve, we'll continue to serve as the drivers for violence against law enforcement in the excerpt that I read just a while ago. As an intentional admission or perhaps an unintentional admission that the police shootings of black people will continue along with the non-indictments acquittals or in the case of the now former cop who killed Terence Crutcher in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 2016 all charges removed from record. The rhetoric of statistics as objective empirical truth when they are in fact not employed in this leaked threat assessment can be deciphered to be part of the parcel of the methods in the FBI's intelligent sources and methods that work to name black political struggle as an ideological and statistically verifiable threat to police power. Nowhere in the threat assessment are any credible specifics around future violent acts targeted at police. Instead it only offers the black identity extremist as a category manufacturer to trigger one could guess the bureau's counter intelligence tools such as the recruiting of informants and its other methods of disruption and discrediting. In whose streets Brittany Farrell co-founder of the St. Louis base Millennial Activists United calls for a different future tense. One that centers a black queer critique of our current governing order. This 2017 documentary follows Brittany Farrell and her partner Alexis Templeton throughout their activist work or caretaking during the Ferguson uprising and beyond. A highway shut down their wedding movement work within the city community meetings with elected officials Ferguson October protests disrupting acts and loving acts. Millennium Activists United is a grassroots organization created by black queer women. Their way of caring demonstrates that black queer revolutionary love can make possible by showing what it looks like to love black people in public spaces like their shutdown of the I-70 highway where one motorist violently drove through their protestors human barricade. This love is strategic and it's beautiful as they echo a soccer throughout the documentary. It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our change. At one point during the documentary Brittany Farrell outlines a method for a deciphering practice when she says I just challenged these ideas of normality. If your normal is limited opportunities for people of color, why aren't you questioning that normal? If that normal is an 18-year-old teenager laying in the street for four hours but that's your normal, right? Everybody wants things to be normal. I feel like if you are not questioning normal you're not paying attention. We can take from Brittany Farrell's quote that if you're not questioning colonial forms of civilization then you're willfully not paying attention. Although Sylvia Winter's essay on deciphering practice is focused on texts like film that shape imaginaries of our current governing order we can still look to it as a means of getting at a way of reading our presence in the making of our anti-colonial futures in city spaces and elsewhere. Or as Brittany Farrell aptly put it it's that feeling that keeps me going. So if we don't hold on to that feeling this deciphering practice we remain as Winter puts it accomplices in the epistemic contract. And she warns that function not in the name of liberation but in replicating our current governing order. Thank you. So thank you all for these really phenomenal papers and I think there's lots to talk about and I know that we've got just about 15 minutes for this panel. So I'm just going to say a couple of quick things and open it up for discussion. I also just want to ask when people ask their questions. Maybe we can take two or three questions together just to make this a little bit more participatory and have as many voices as we can. These are three I think very different papers but all of them are speaking to the idea of the experiment. It seems to me they're all thinking about it seems to experiment not just with form but then what that does to changing the story. I think the idea that Robert asked about what kinds of new stories can we tell. And there's something very interesting it seems to me that's happening between text and image in all of these presentations and actually your experiments. So there's a kind of way in which kind of textual life and worlds appear within the image economies that all of you are speaking about and I want to ask of course a question about not having any visuals at all for Simone which I think is very political and actually deeply meaningful too. So anyway just to kind of note that so I just want to say a couple of things about a couple of sentences if at all for each of the presentations and then I'll open it up. I'm going to start actually with Simone's because I think again thinking about image thinking about text but also I think your own politics of not having any images and not having a presentation at all and I want to think about that as a very meaningful and thoughtful political practice. So I want to ask you about what it means not to see right in some sense because there is such a tremendous focus on actually seeing and seeing not merely as being visible and present but as surveillance in the kind of narrative that you've given us so there's something very interesting also that you're saying here about what it means to think about kind of rematerializing black life when it's been dematerialized and rendered either algorithmic or racialized within other modes of seeing especially data which was something that we have been talking a lot about so I just want to kind of mark that and ask you about that. I think the question of you talk a lot about the question of biography and autobiography it seems to mean what you presented to us what is the relationship between as you said in a couple of places there's me looking at you and looking at you from the side of my eye. So the question of the biography of a community which clearly is very much at the heart of the kinds of practices that you're thinking through and autobiography so where is the self and where is the biography of a community in what you presented to us and I think this question of kind of labor this beautiful way in which you speak about braiding and the activity of braiding incredibly intimate private in some ways but as the space where if you actually watch the conversation you said it's over three hours long so if you actually have the patience to stay with the rhythm of braiding that's what we get by following you through on this kind of virtual conversation and again this question of kind of labor the work of the hands of the women that you're engaging and I think you're also making a lot of tactical decisions as did Simone about what can be seen not seen so the spaces of braiding are actually kind of dark spaces that you don't want us to explore too carefully as you said with your engagement with the Nigerian in the braiding salon so just thinking again about this relationship between what it means to think of a kind of biography and autobiography when race and the gendered body and queerness are really at issue how much do we want to see how much do we not want to reveal and then I guess Robert finally I wish we had seen Istanbul and Mumbai I think was my own that's my own comment but it was interesting to me that we had a talk the keynote that had spoken about the kind of parsimony of information or the parsimony of the algorithm and in many ways it seems like pushing against that by giving us a plethora of different modes and means of media and communication and so I kind of wanted to ask you about that and kind of responses of navigating the site where we're getting so much textual information that's being encoded through the images and the way that people are navigating the site and I wanted to just ask you about that the relationship between plethora and plenitude in some sense of the kind of text that you're working with and parsimony and just to speak of that as a kind of methodological decision as well but also the kind of story you want to tell us about the history of a city I suppose because what I saw with Berlin was really the way in which land gets made into territory gets then made into urban land and then becomes the site of real estate and speculation for all four of the cities that you were working with what were the comparables and you spoke about comparison at some point so just kind of wondering about that but with that I'm just going to open to questions and then maybe you can come back and respond to maybe or if you wanted to do that first I'll go I see like you had something to say this is actually the first time I've given a paper without visuals I usually do visual studies in fact this morning before I got here I was looking at the different memes on Twitter of my FBI agent he's watching me through my camera so I can use from my class later on so what I said the malice and the nausea plural it's actually a riff on winter's essay where she's talking about Ivan from Harder They Come and Rahim from Do the Right Thing so she continually repeats the Ivans and the Rahims and so here's your question often when we are doing these lists or maybe these visual moments it's often of dead black people and those lists are important in many ways Sandra Bland, Ayanna Byrd Philando Castile, Mike Brown Trayvon Martin and the list continues but those accounting practices and particularly when it comes to the visual the ways in which black death gets circulated online in news feeds you know they're troubling this is the only way that we can understand black life is that and consume it is through black death and so I wanted to maybe make a political intervention in that way around aesthetic choices and maybe not the choice to display at these moments but to think around these questions and particularly Wendy's question of who are our neighbors what it means to love sorry I can jump in after Simone and just talk about some of my decisions thinking about mourning or presenting images of black individuals depending on which side of the scenario you are on looking at a community looking into a culture we do a lot of that when we are mapping or doing data visualizations we're looking at a thing, we're trying to quantify and visualize it we're trying to represent it and what that means to simplify to take and flatten and simplify in that way also I feel it was extremely powerful and there was a lot of seeing and looking that I did with Simone just at the podium as herself that some of that writing some of what she is talking about is already scripted on her and so why have the images so there was a wonderful question and answer in the moment for me with Simone not having any of the images and then you asked about what you talked about this idea of labor in mourning or and for me as a graphic designer I think some of that the time that we spend making work is quite invisible you have to make something that proves itself that seems reliable that's the work and I collaborate with developers and there's an enormous amount of work and time and labor that goes in these projects are coded by hand so we're not using any templates we're experimenting, we're exploring and so also think about time in that way, how to produce digital works that honor some of that labor that goes into the practice I'll just a few words about the sort of the techniques of representation in the piece and its relationship to I think personally is a really good word because there was a desire to push back on the way that perhaps even just personally the way I normally work which is a lot of that material is present but then it gets compressed and abstracted away into sort of more standard cartography trying to come up with the symbology that represents some of those things and at a moment of sort of deciding what it was going to be making the decision to keep all of that open and on the table and sort of a maximal approach to it and see what we could pull together in that way and I think especially because prior to this piece I've had a number of projects that dealt primarily with data and it's almost a desire to kind of get away from those projects a little bit and work with other types of media in a way that was still in my opinion cartographic and had the potential for sort of sort of thick or complex descriptions of place rather than trying to distill it into sort of a single legible story I guess we can can we maybe take three questions at a time with that just to kind of maximize the conversation from Maximal Inclusion Hi my question is for Simone thank you for all your insights on the topic I think you know a lot about your introduction and if perhaps you have any additional insights on the ways in which trans embodiment or rather or more broadly the material conditions of queerness might become sites of resistance within the hegemonic colonial structures that you are describing so I was probably thinking along the lines of and Kathy Cohen's work is very important here around thinking of queerness as a practice outside of it being an identity formation and when you look at who is at the forefront of the Black Lives Matter movement so for example not only in the US but also in Canada in Toronto in particular how with many queer femme gender nonconforming who basically shut down Toronto Pride to make demands around having a uniformed not having uniformed officers marching in the parade but also to have financial support for black and brown organizations within the city and they were able to even get those things along with the freedom school so more in terms of not necessarily embodiment but of loving the right of freedom for all and what that kind of love allowed for if it's the shutting down of a highway or protest in that way so that was more of an analytic and a practice I was thinking in that term. Hi thank you everyone so much for your papers on this question is also for Simone but so when you were talking about this FBI document and how it kind of was like in the future tense predicting future kind of backlash against the police I was thinking about Wendy's claim that like models tend to put futures in place that are just abstractions of the past right and that the future like this is the future that will come true if the same thing I anti black violence continues to happen which kind and then recalled to me or it's kind of intervention at the end of your paper earlier about how can we kind of conceive of alternate temporalities or how can we intervene into the temporality whereby kind of future the kind of future will or like the past and here's in the present but so does the future right so kind of we will this likelihood of kind of backlash against the police necessarily puts in puts the future and puts in puts into place a future where there's just more anti black violence and I'm just wondering if you could say a little bit more about kind of how the temporality of that document or how you conceive of like intervening into temporality in activist work or academic work if that makes sense I probably just do academic work we're going to take one more question we're just going to take one more question and then I think bring it to a close so I really just do academic work but I look towards people doing who are abolitionists and as Ruthie Gillmore would say it's something that you have to imagine or understand is going to happen in your lifetime so it's not a future put so far in advance because these declassified documents, these leak documents are alibis for the state's violence and so they're almost always going to actualize in the way that in Texas now there's someone being held on a black identity stream as kind of charge he was when they rated so people who black people who are Second Amendment rights activists when they rated his house they found the copy of Negro with guns and that becomes part of the documents that used to substantiate that he is a threat to the state but that's why I look at the role of artists and creative works and I recently came across an artist, Tamar Clark Brown that's doing some work on black women's hair braiding and I think the connections are there and encryption and they're wearing GoPro as they braid each other's hair and then through some type of algorithm that's, I don't know how they're doing it but they're making it in some type of code to rethink the ways that I guess, and it points very much to your coding around the braiding salon here but to see black women's knowledge production and the physical labor of braiding as a way of challenging the ways in which we are able to help things as you say get written on our bodies and I think your work does that if you could say a bit more about that. Sure. When I was responding earlier I was talking about myself as a designer but my work as a designer as I move through spaces outside of home is to reassert the value of black women and sort of black material culture so thinking about hair braiding as something that often isn't raised up to the same standard or talked about in the academy along with other kinds of new media practices along with other kinds of visual production, thinking about that labor, thinking about the mathematics involves the precision involved the ideas around tension that are involved that maybe you could see in other professions like engineering and all of those things so reasserting value in some of these practices and talking about them in tandem with other things that I speak to my students about like pattern you know digital tools thinking about measuring and all of these different things think about 3D printing and fabrication and how we can learn from these practices and again coding by hand this rule-based closed system that can produce variables I think is always an interesting analogy for me in relationship to braiding.