 Hi, my name is Alexandra Cunningham Cameron and I'm a Curator of Contemporary Design and HIN Secretary of Scholar at Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. Welcome to Confusing the Algorithm, Fashion Surveillance and Racial Bias, featuring the work of Chinook Felix de Miranda, Pascal Sablon, and Madh Achempong, also known as Dainty Funk. The idea for convening this panel emerged from a reflection on Willie Smith's constant reference to the street as a source of influence and as a metaphorical space where people could walk together in their difference with tremendous optimism. And in the late 1970s and early 80s, he talked about surveilling the street from his studio to evaluate his success as a designer, whether or not his designs were reaching people and how to examine how people wore their clothes, how they moved, how they navigated their daily lives. And the way that Willie Smith talks about the streets as analog spaces of inspiration, improvisation, happenstance, feels distinct to a growing understanding of our own experience of the streets today, both built and digital. There exists now a different kind of eyes on the street, those of cameras tracking and storing our movements, predictive policing devices, geotags, personal security systems collecting data around our behaviors, and the traffic of our digital worlds through which an increasing amount of our social exchanges and retail transactions occur has created the opportunity to enforce, predict, and shape our interests and our habits, somehow narrowing while also expanding our spheres of influence. There are various ways that the fashion system has participated in a mass surveilled society from corporate marketing that exploits social media algorithms to dazzle wear that blurs identity during protests, in some cases, co-opting and other cases, resisting. The magnitude with which technological advances have increased access while also threatening civil liberties, often perpetuating cycles of discrimination, is really the focus of our speakers today. We'll discuss how their own practices work to undermine racism and oppression within the built and digital realms of fashion and beyond. I'll introduce them now. Design researcher and critical fashion practitioner, Chinook Filik Demiranda, explores the crossover between the fashion system and digital culture by focusing on introducing digital literacy in fashion. In her practice, she approaches fashion as a subliminal communication vehicle, which she aims to demystify in order to inform consumers on complex matters regarding individual agency within our current digital culture. Her ongoing research project, The Algorithmic Gaze, explores and explains the digitization of fashion and the new ways the fashion system and its consumers connect and communicate through newly acquired technological rhythms. Ma Da Chempong, also known as a deity funk, is an interdisciplinary spoken word artist and filmmaker who uses drag and the art of transformation to explore personal ideas about gender and blackness, as well as reclaiming American clowning and performance. Dainty Funk is an all-encompassing aesthetic movement that describes the intersection between vanity and vulnerability, the soft and the grotesque, frill and fright. The most recent project, Soné de la négritude, is a poetry visual project that explores these dichotomies. And finally, Pascal Sablan is an associate at Ajay Associates. She is more than 14 years of experience working on a diversity of projects around the world. Pascal is a 315th living African-American woman registered as an architect in the United States. She's an activist architect who works to advance the field for the betterment of society and bring visibility to issues concerning women and BIPOC designers. She founded the Beyond the Built Environment Organization to uniquely address the inequitable disparities in architecture. Pascal is president-elect of the National Organization of Minority Architects, the fifth woman to hold this position. She was awarded the 2020 AIA New York State President's Award and the 2021 AIA Whitney M. Young Jr. Award for her advocacy efforts. She lectures at universities and cultural institutions and is the youngest African-American to join the AIA College of Fellows. Chinook, modern Pascal, thank you all for being here. They will each present their work and then be available for a Q&A period, which I will moderate. So thank you so much. And over to you, Chinook. Thank you so much for having me. Let me check. Share screen. Okay. So, on a day-to-day basis, I see so many ads online that I'm now up to the point that I don't even notice them anymore. They linger in the corners of my screen or they pop up in my email and they've suddenly melted into my Instagram feed. And basically they follow my every move. Usually I don't really mind because they often showcase products that I'm interested in and I will click and click and click to the point where I'm like, how did I end up here? And that's how my five-minute break usually turns into a 30-minute scroll. Applications like Instagram do that to me a lot and it mostly feels like I'm at fault because I mean I could stop if I wanted to. But in most applications, I'm able to curate my fee, which gives me a sense of agency and commercial brands capture our attention by tapping into an aesthetic appearance of our online environment. And they do this by dangling consumable products in front of us that aesthetically fit into our digital safe space. So in actuality, what we're consuming is the image and the image is concurrently forming our interest in our taste. So it happens when the current site guys is strongly related to cultural tropes. Brands are turning marginalized aesthetics into consumable products. By taking the aesthetics from people that they social economically do not serve. So my practice focuses on the crossover between fashion and digital culture and the way we engage with fashion and our online environment from the consumer's point of view. And during our time online, we often unknowingly come across various modes of engagement. So in terms of dynamic marketing and the cultivation of an algorithmic gaze, understanding these helps us comprehend how cultural tropes are communicated and often very misleading. So the experience and process of engaging with digital marketing is built upon the following components. You have rhythm analysis, visual, visual culture, new media, consumer psychology and propaganda. And I want to focus on the idea of rhythm analysis really quick because it lies at the base of the way we experience our everyday life and also our extended digital life. And it helps us understand what cultivates an algorithmic gaze. So we live our lives in rhythms and we encountered biological rhythms such as sleep, hunger and thirst on a day to day basis, but also more mechanical and social rhythms such as traffic lights or weekend versus workdays. In the fashion industry, these rhythms are found in form of visual influence and they condition our consumer behavior. So they control consumption habits in form of seasonal collections and the constant change towards the new. So what the algorithmic gaze does is create a personalized rhythm based upon your preferences. And a visual feed like Instagram or Pinterest is filled with obvious and not so obvious advertising and algorithms capture what you click on or when you linger and try to find a common denominator, such as a color or a specific item or an aesthetic and it learns from your scrolling behavior and it tends to curate a new feed. So while you're using these apps, you're unknowingly designing your own digital bubble. So visually, everything starts to overlap and everything starts to look the same. So this sameness refers to a so-called digital collective conscious or is sometimes referred to as collective consumption of aesthetics. And this tunnel vision can be regarded as the algorithmic gaze. So a personal bias and a comfortable bubble in which you're simply being approached as a full time consumer. The fashion industry tends to employ this bias for commercial gain and is very dedicated in catering to their marketing strategies to the comfort of your bubble. And it can be regarded as a form of mindset marketing in which advertising follows you around across a multitude of platforms reinforcing this rhythm of influence. So as fashions algorithms surveil and adapt to the current zeitgeist, your digital footprint helps them navigate towards a collective mindset because a group of like-minded people is always easier to target than one person. So these bias narratives and stylized bubbles seem to work in favor of these marketing strategies. So in order to explore these personalized narratives, I've hosted digital footprint workshops in which participants screen record their scrolling behavior while using these new media platforms in search of either visual triggers or insulated structures. And the goal is to demystify online fashion media and propel conversation amongst consumers. So our environment is so personally tailored and dictated by our behavior and an example is where a participant focused on the ethnicity of the people she was seeing via Instagram Explorer feed, which consisted for 96% of individuals of Asian descent, which also translated into the type of advertising she was seeing. So by acknowledging that these bubbles exist and cultivate a bias narrative, we can create an understanding in terms of how our digital environment is morphed and how digital marketing plays into that. In order to connect with the collective conscience, brands are in need to define the contemporary momentum. So it propels campaigns like H&M's Comeback Stronger, which is meant to signify a revert of acceptance in which the physical and cultural norm experience are reset. So specifically concerns of body, this specifically concerns body types, skin color, hairstyles, which are in high demand of radical acceptance. And it's an approach that's very obviously edged toward cultural relevancy and a step towards embracing diversity, because we now get sea braids, full figures, darker skin color. But we're seeing this because we've demanded this and because it spikes our interest. And in reality, while cultural tropes are being capitalized upon to a highly aspirational point of view, diversity doesn't always translate beyond the visual. So it wasn't until consumers demanded a more inclusive narrative that diversity was deemed important in order to even connect with an audience. So Calvin Klein is an example of a brand that has always been more forward in connecting to a contemporary audience through highlighting their audience as others, the other being the outlier of the social norm, which is a, which the brand has actually successfully turned into a desirable but commercialized group. And the notion of the other is often related to ethnicity, which Calvin Klein emphasizes to creative collaboration, collaboration such as the current here impressing collaboration and the typecasting of people of color as alternative, alternative icons such as Zivert and Nas. So when I click on my sponsored ad in my Instagram feed, my social currency seems to focus towards girls of mixed race descent intertwined with the occasional plus size or curvy body. And overall it strokes with the rest of my feet. But there's a problem with these algorithm algorithms as form of surveillance mechanisms in the context of fashion communication and marketing because they serve, they serve as a form of inclusive exclusivity. So diversity gets commercialized by showing different people to different, different, different images to different people. So when it comes to seeing what we like and liking what we see. We as users do not have sole agency over the narrative. So targeting a certain demographic with specific images polarizes the target target groups even more. So our interest is surveilled it's used as base as design base and then presented to us in a form of service and our personal taste and can then gets conditioned and capitalized upon and thrives by us. So, sort of speak this by staying in our lane, sort of speak. It's a self sufficient cycle that keeps audiences contained and inadvertently also feeds of itself. So you're being sold what you're curated yourself you're not getting credit or even worse you're not even getting acknowledged as a source of inspiration. While industry is making money off of it. So, an example of an unobtainable but relatable aesthetic is the collaboration between Burberry and color studio which is a musical platform in which new emerging artists perform. It is following holds a urban demographic in which it opens a new doorway for Burberry to connect with the younger audience. In the campaign centers around artists of colors that are portrayed and we're able to connect with through either their music or styling their skin their skin color and their hair texture or other stylistic throats that you're able to shop directly from the image. And this easy access generated through online shopping formats is very misleading because these campaigns are often geared towards audience that towards an audience that does not have the financial means to actually buy the products. So this back that is so luxuriously draped across these bodies holds a price tag of $2,000 and it's marketed to a certain demographic while using other demographic demographics cultural tropes. So the digitization of fashion enables brands to reveal the likings of an audience for financial gain at the cost of culture. So in conclusion, algorithms accelerate a collaborative consumption of aesthetics and inherently denies those who inspire the fashion industry any type of ownership. And by capitalizing and appropriating cultural tropes fashion brands and their digital marketing strategies allude to an obtainable image that seems to celebrate diversity. While the social economics standard does not comply with the inclusive atmosphere is set out to portray. So it adds up to an inclusive exclusion. Thank you. That was my presentation. Hi everyone, I'm Pascal Sablan. And I want to share with you my presentation and talk to you a little bit about architecture in its role. So for me, I want to just introduce slightly, and thank you so much for the update or the bio it really kind of captured most of it. But what I really want to talk to is just how rare we are as an architect, as a person of color and as a woman in the in the field in the profession. And we make up point zero two percent of the profession and therefore I identify myself as not just an architect but a Jedi architect. I want to talk about the justice equity diversity inclusion, where I advocate for our culture identities within the built environment and dismantle the injustices that embedded there. So to make that point I want to talk to you a little bit about how architecture was used specifically to facilitate those oppressions. So we have an example of Robert Moses, who had a large impact into the way New York was designed a lot of the public spaces including Central Park, as well as Jones Beach and other public spaces. And although in my education, he was glorified as this amazing person who's done great work. What wasn't translated or kind of communicated was that he was an advocate racist against not just black people but undesirables which is immigrants. And he understood that it we took buses as mass transit to get to places. And so to ensure that us as undesirables were not able to reach Jones Beach. He actually mandated that all the overpass bridges 20 plus bridges over the Southern State Parkway be designed and constructed nine feet or shorter to make sure that our bus couldn't fit. So this is an example of how the built environment was constructed to facilitate that racism. Then you have developments that have financial tax incentives to utilize and incur and have affordable housing components but yet at the same time have different entrances support doors and market doors which is in in most terms the modern day example of whites and colors only. Then you have gentrification and redlining there's many ways in which architecture is utilized to perpetuate those systems. And we talk about I'm talking about this to say we need to understand that there's tangible moments that the built environment has been telling the story about who we are where we're allowed to be. And I identify large locations or high pinnacles of very significant moments in cities that have statues of those who were who fought vehemently to maintain slavery who fought vehemently to make sure that a certain demographic of the community or the country felt less than. And so really starting to dismantle and these claim those spaces is really important. So as we talk about surveillance. This is also a remembrance of. I fought for you to stay in chains and yes now you have to look up at me when you come to your town. So just understanding that and also following the suit of places like New Orleans who have replaced statues with components of culture and identity where they're starting to create places for the Mardi Gras costumes that clothing that fashion to be at the center and at the highest point of the city and to put the power of the people on display. Then there's also this idea and this is really related to retail and the way we shop and the way we engage spaces but also the way we live. And it's called septet and it's basically stands for crime prevention through architectural intervention environmental design and it focuses on supervision on public and private spaces on access control and surveillance. And the problem with that is that it really centers the way people interact on crime rather than on giving communities power. It criminalizes blackness under the guise of safety and it promotes an unwarranted interaction with the police. People people of color really weren't pushed against or away from spaces until it became something that the police was able to enforce. And so if there was a dispute between you and your neighbor. That was for you to figure out but now that the police are in then it starts to mindset of is this person supposed to be here. Do they have the right to claim this space can they be walking on my block. This is somebody that I should be a family afraid of and therefore that starts to police the way we inhabit in the type of welcomeings we feel when we're in terms of spaces. So the work that I've been doing and passionate of doing is engaging the community through architecture to advocate for equity, equitable, reflectively diverse environments and what that means is a space where we all feel welcomed, but also a place that reflects the culture that is bespoke to that town in the community that's the present. And so the three projects that I'm going to quickly present to you to kind of share that experience starts with format which was located in Queens. My client was Nigel Sylvester. He is a G star he he is a pro BMX bike rider very successful and he wanted to create a store where he could share some of the tools and the components in the clothing that is the person of who he was right. And so we found a spot in Queens because that location was remnants of where he came from. The next is that he his style of writing of what the way he writes his bike is instead of bike parks or skate parks he actually arrives through the streets of Manhattan through New York. And so leveraging that that became the concept and the way we thought about designing the spaces. So for instance the clothing rack is actually the same proportion and slope of handrails that he usually uses to slide up and down. And also kind of thinking about the New York City skyline and the way that he uses steps in his tricks as well starts to create the language in the way we create the spaces for the way the components are displayed. And then really just thinking about how that space could be enhanced through again in bedding his culture into the space his identity into the space. And so in the plan and this kind of speaks to when we talk about how you plan a space for retail. You know you are taught to really locate your your cashier desk in a location where it gives you access to merchandise but also gives you full access of the door to ensure that no one will come in and steal product or merchandise. Instead we took the approach that we're going to allow for more flexibility or more communal space in the center of the build of the program space to allow for one to feel welcomed and to feel that they can go through to space even to be adjacent to the room that has a lot of the merchandise and storage because we trust you right we are inviting you into the space that is part of Nigel's identity and this is a space that you're welcome to be. Another project is the Cleveland Foundation headquarters in Cleveland, Ohio. And with this one, the reason why I want to bring it up although it isn't specifically retail. It is really echoing the idea of community engagement and really pulling communities in. So first with the design process, we actually have many meetings with the community to hear what they needed and what they felt like. And it's connecting to the main road here Euclid Avenue and E66 Street connecting to a predominant black community called the Huff community. And right now as a pedestrian from that community, this is what your block looks like. And so really understanding what that built environment perpetuates and also offers to the contextual language of their environment. And then what we were actually offering them as another means of another method of creating that. And also the development is not just our building but also expanding the green spaces and creating pedestrian friendly locations for people to really enjoy and to have it. And so there's large programs more than 90% of the ground floor is for public open use. You do not need to have any business in this headquarters to come here use a living room, this lounge, use the Wi Fi and participate in this space. This space itself is communicating the need for you to know that you are welcomed, and that's embraced through transparency that's embraced the materiality and that's embraced through the programming of the project. So really quickly just kind of showcasing that is as a Huff community walking down the block, you have access to this community space for gathering, you have access to this multi purpose space for performances and needs. And then this is that community lounge and lobby that we talked about community gallery that we talked about as well. So the idea and the intention is to really create architecture that invites people into this building, not just as a symbol, but actually creating programming and providing value for their use in their identity into the space and create more of a collaborative relationship between those who are working in the in the in that zone to those who live and operate in it and have the architecture stand up for them in that capacity. Lastly is Bronx Point. Bronx Point is in Bronx, New York. This project is a 542 affordable housing project with the first ever brick and mortar hip hop museum, and when I say brick and mortar that means physically built. So we're saying that this is the first time an actual museum is actually physically built as dedicated to the identities and the contributions of hip hop to not just to our culture but to society globally at large. The concept of the entire development irregardless of all the different programs that's within is still hip hop, meaning our value our identity who we are as a people is of value and should be manifested into the built environment. Therefore we use bricks that are darker tones black bricks if you will, we have the windows and fenestrations dancing movement to remits the movement of architecture of hip hop and dance then how it perpetuates into the spaces. And really when you look at this project, do you see public housing and do you see a place that one could see as home and be pride, and have pride in seeing. And here is a view of what that retail experience feels like right we are adjacent to Milpawn Park, and then we made sure that we always had a facade of retail that's perpendicular to the main road to ensure that it's visible and seen. We are not hiding who we are in terms of the graphics and really identifying and exploring who we are as people through the culture and through the spaces, and then really providing adjacent spaces that allow for community engagement and what I mean by that and showing you in plan in terms of the retail areas on the ground floor and the museum area that we talked about is that we created a public plaza here to the north of the page. That is really for people to be able to enjoy seating chairs so that you are able to participate and be there and enjoy that space. We also have a upland connection that connects people that to the water, but also provides an opportunity for kind of Hollywood stars if you will But there where we had records of those who've impacted hip hop and embedding their names and their contributions into the soil into the ground into the surface that we can recognize and celebrate. And then also we provided fully public accessible waterfront. It's important to understand that waterfront is not just a privilege of some who have financial deep pockets, but actually a community asset that everyone should have access to. And really, again, creating another access point through vehicular access to get to this. And we beautified the parks to ensure that there has up to date and healthy and accessible equipment for all to share and enjoy. So I just wanted to share these ways and these components of how retail specifically can be positioned, not just the way the space functions like what we talked about with format, but also the way the space is in relationship to public zones and public areas where we as a people, the black bodies who have been imprisoned the black bodies who have been told they're not allowed or accessible, are able to see that there are spaces that's designed for them that reflects them and welcomes them at the same time. Thank you. Hello. Let me just get my screen share together. Okay. Hello, everyone. My name is Mog Cheris, then I got a son taught a champion are you. You can just call me mod. I'm a fan of the funk a poet drag clown on all relevant social media platforms. And before I begin, I would just like to thank the keeper Hewitt Museum, the Smithsonian and most importantly my fellow panelists, a Chinook and Pascal for participating and adding such wonderful and points to this conversation. I am hoping to add to this conversation with my experience as an online content creator, and the ways that I'm attempting to subvert surveillance through my own practice. I want to begin with a poem, my own poem the watching eye. The bullet tear through again. I lost count became afraid that the fucking bullet. It knew my name. It knew my street, and in no time know my rhythm, know my rhyme. I promise that this will be the first and last time I quote myself during this presentation. But I wanted to open with this poem because I believe that it contextualizes the relationship between policing imitation and surveillance, specifically within black communities. If we're thinking of surveillance as a vehicle for violence when used by the state, as well as a vehicle for erasure when imitated by the hegemonic or majority community. We see the parallels between the bullet both patrolling the streets and collecting information so that it can know the rhythm and rhyme of its inhabitants. My experience online is largely influenced by me being a dark skinned black non binary cultural worker with a hyper visible social media following. So I will be speaking mostly from that perspective, but the surveillance occupation serves absolutely no one. The first phase of complete digitized erasure is digitized isolation black content creators myself included often find ourselves in the position of the educator, whether that is through a makeup tutorial, people inquiring where we get our clothing from giving historical context about racism, or more intentional political commentary, even without our consent, we often find ourselves teaching some one something. This is very reminiscent of the Mammy trope and more traditional media like movies and television, where darker skinned women were relegated to positions of coddler teacher child viewer. This mothering expectation encourages you were users to see us as a resource from learning for a place for character development, not as people. And because that is what users engage with the algorithm only pushes that kind of content from black creators. This encourages tone policing when black creators do not want to opt into content like that, or when they are not kind understanding and patient with the interfaces users and the cycle continues black content creators are also often the target of incessant hate speech because of the faceless nature of online interactions. Instead of supporting those creators, the response from the interfaces are often to take down those pages, the content creators page because that is something that they can have access to. And in some cases when black content creators choose to respond to that rhetoric in their comment sections, users can use that same tool meant to protect content creators from harassment to report those content creators pages. I actually posted a video this morning where I talked about how people being able to opt in to alternative fashion choices dilutes the political nature of alternative clothing. It used to be a signal for political affiliation for morals and values. Now because of cultural exchange, you cannot tell who is punk for the aesthetic or who is punk for the politics, and it was taken down for hate speech. The second phase of this phenomenon of digitized erasure is imitation. That phase predates the digitized surveillance we see today, but I do believe it serves as an important pillar of the American imagination, given it is the only theatrical art form indigenous to the United States. The act of white men imitating black people, imitating black music is the only indigenous form of American entertainment. That is very, very important. The first picture is still a Bo Derek in the critically acclaimed 1977 film or killer whale, where she dons what I know and what many of my black companions would know to be cornrows, but what many white women at the time dubbed Bo Brates. Shortly afterwards in 1981, a federal court held that an airline that bans the all braided hairstyle was not liable for race discrimination. The judge noted instead that the hairstyle was popularized by the white actress Bo Derek, instead of being a culturally significant I'm sure this person needs no introduction. Rachel doze was president of the NAACP chapter in Spokane Washington from 2014 to 2015, where she resigned in the midst of controversy over her racial identity, when her white parents revealed that she was biologically their child. And so we have an actual white person being able to infiltrate these spaces, being able to dawn the aesthetics of black people and black culture, not experience the violence from those aesthetics, while simultaneously enjoying the benefits from being a part of that community. And we also see kids going to school wearing ethnically and culturally significant hairstyles being sent home, because it is a distraction to education supposedly, while it is simultaneously lauded on a fashion stage on white models. We see that there is religious based violence based on the clothing and headwear that you wear. And yet we see those clothing garments on the runways. And this is that second phase. After those two phases, we move on to the final phase of complete digitized erasure. These are searches that I did on my own time a couple of weeks ago of accessories aesthetics fashion movements that I know to be specific to the black community. Here you have who earrings in the first search. There is hardly no black people in that first couple of searches. And it is mostly white faced white skinned people, non black people. In the second picture I looked up acrylic nails, mostly white hands, or non black hands in that picture. In the third, I searched up braids. In the third picture that comes up in the search, Kim Kardashian comes up and hardly any dark skinned people. And the last photo, street wear, which is aesthetic movement and fashion movement started by black people, you can see on Tik Tok, it will show the original creator. You can see that the original creator is a black man. And yet, all of the videos under that are of lighter skinned, non black people. I'm using Tina Bell as a case study. A lot of people might not know. In 1993, the Seattle band Bam Bam was fronted by the amazingly talented black woman front woman Tina Bell. They were the first to create the sound and lyrical foundation for grunge. But if you look up the word grunge, all you see is Nirvana, other bands with white men in it. And there is no accreditation to Tina Bell's legacy. So what do we do about it? Well, in my personal experience as a drag clown, I often am obscuring my face in some way. The project was actually inspired by this presentation, the idea of being able to obscure my visage and facade and prevent people from knowing who I am and also having the agency and ability to obscure my image and present what I want to present to certain communities being able to have the ability to obscure my black skin from surveillance in that way in a physical and direct way is the way that I am choosing to combat surveillance on my Instagram, on my Tiktok, on pages that have a history of collecting information from communities that look like me. These are some of my resources for this presentation. Please I consider or please consider looking at some of these and reading more about this information. Thank you. Thank you, Mod Pascal and and Chinook if you all wouldn't mind turning on your videos. Hi. I'm starting to get some questions coming in from the audience so thank you to everyone who is submitting. I wanted to start with a particular question. Because the expression of your work is all quite different. You're working as social justice advocates. You're navigating digital performance, digital art, academia, architecture, and I wondered how you got started and whether there is an experience or a personal influence that led you towards working for social change in your field and this is a question for everyone but maybe would you want to kick it off? Sure. Thank you so much for the question. I've always known that I wanted to be an architect even when I was little because I was an artist and was constantly drawing. And so when I went to my undergraduate program, second week, a professor asked me and another student to stand in a class of 60 students and said, Okay, these two will never become architects because they're black and because they're women. But a professor who didn't know my name would make such a strong proclamation. It also wasn't lost on me that my peers were just silent on this and then also in a room full of 60 people, it was only two of us that complied with this pre-represent. And so in that moment I realized as a person who grew up in Queens, predominantly Haitian community, and went to an all girls Catholic preparatory school, it was crazy to me to be in a space to be told that I'm less than for two things that I was celebrated about in my education and my community upbringing. And so that moment I call is the moment that I realized that I would never walk into the room and just represent myself, that I would always be representing women and people of color and therefore I had a responsibility to show up and show out to be amazing to be better. And I talk about being 315th, but that means I'm 0.02% of the profession are black women. So it is also a responsibility of me of one of the rarities in the space of the profession to speak about us and to show volume and conviction about justice when I speak about black and brown communities as well as women. And there's other ways and the built environment specifically was not designed for us the heights of the doorknobs that the heights of the cabinets, the temperatures because you know we're always wearing sweaters. It's all set to the man's body type. And so just understanding that role and that perception and that education allows me to push us forward through this these conversations and welcome us to really be part of the conversation, how we transform our built environment and have that built environment support us know things that we're trying to do. Yeah, in my experience, the practice kind of came before the justification. Like similarly, I'm sure Pascal, like as a kid was super interested in all struck by like the idea of architecture, and then afterwards was encouraged, like, because of life experiences to pursue it in the ways that she has. Like, I was painting my face for fun. I, I started this online social media thing during quarantine, and at the height of the George Floyd protests, and I was receiving a lot of vitriol, because of me doing a lot of poems about my black experience and my black identity and the harm that I was feeling happening in real time on these digital spaces. And I was like, okay, like I can't let this happen to my fellow black comrades like I have to do something about this. And that's when I started working on like being more intentional about the art pieces that I was putting out who had access to those pieces who I was interacting with on my social media pages, who I was uplifting. But yeah, I started out just, you know, being an artistic person and wanting to do that publicly and then as a result of my life experiences and wanting other people that look like me to also feel comfortable being on these spaces. I decided to be a bit more intentional about saying who it's for, you know, I think for me, it was very gradual and through selecting up on my experience, I started to realize like, okay, this is actually what I'm doing. Right. It was more of an embodied experience. I'm, I'm mixed race, and I grew up in a small town in the Netherlands in predominantly white space. So I had, or I instinctively adapted. And it's, it's also small things like, like my hair, I used to straighten my hair and every just like then I moved to a bigger city where it was way more multicultural. I started to get into like the curly girl method, appreciate myself or my text, my hair texture and stuff like that. So then I joined a master's program, which focuses on fashion strategy. I learned a lot about the social political sphere of fashion. And I was always interested in the digital aspect of our day to day life. And this master's, although it was very fulfilling to me academically, it's also kind of although women were encouraging all the men were saying I wasn't really fit to explore a digital a digital work field, because I would never make it I would be run over so that made me kind of like push back more and just be like, okay, why are you seeing this me why am I not able to do this so I mean, maybe gradual and then it turned into resistance that that's my personal experience or why I'm here now because or why my practice revolves around the consumers point of view and not the systems point of view. Thank you. We have a question for Pascal from an audience member. Is there any way that we can protect ourselves as black and brown people from being surveilled in public spaces. Well there's two parts right there's a engaging in the process and creating architecture that dismantles that level of thinking. It's also as a profession stepping away from creating spaces that perpetuate those oppressive natures. But then it's also for you to be knowledgeable about those those strategies and components that are being leveraged to surveillance you. And so really it's about supporting the spaces that are designed for you and in advancing and reflecting who you are, rather than forcing yourself into spaces that is not for you right and so meaning to say you have access to all spaces you move throughout those spaces but really some of those locations are designed in a way to make you feel unwelcome. Right and then so therefore we need to be mindful and thoughtful about how we want to engage does the space deserve my presence does this does this retail store deserve my my money right as my support should I be wearing their brand does this brand suit me or in line with my values. There's a lot of questions that we need to be really more strategic about who we support and how we support and in the spaces as well as claim and demand from your local officials and zones areas about the kind of programs in the spaces you want. It's a conversation and a narrative that we rarely participate in and it's important that we engage in it. And I'll give you an example in downtown Manhattan they were building a federal federal building and in the construction they started to come across African remains. And they were throwing them out of supposedly until a whistle was blown, and then they stopped Howard University came investigated the site and found 419 remains African remains. And we inscribed on the monument that we put on that site, the full map of the African background extent, and it shows that all of downtown Manhattan was literally built on the backs and bones of us. And that means the federal building to the north, the courthouse that we all get married into the south, literally was digging their foundations saw their remains and continue to build anyway. And so that monument reclaim that space and told tells our story. And so it's important that we frequent those spaces we learn those spaces and we also require our government and our built environment to be representative of the history of the important moments that happened in these spaces and identities that we claim. But in terms of how you protect yourself from surveillance is being really knowledgeable about who and why people are surveilling you and the kind of relationship they're trying to have with you as a consumer and be strategic about who you choose to engage with with the gloriousness of who you are and what you bring to the table. Thank you so much for your question. That leads to another question around the complexity of surveillance and digital marketing and how we are often benefiting from the convenience of how the algorithm is tracking our interest and feeding back information to us. That seems to be what we like. And so the question is, are retailers wrong for surveilling my, my, my, my online buying habits. I'm guessing it's for me. Thank you for your question. I don't know if you can call it wrong. It's, it's, it's about consent, and it's about the option of choice. We don't have it. And they make us feel like we have. And that's the problem. So, in that sense, I think, being aware of basically what Pascal just said, is brand stroke with my beliefs. Does it, does it deserve my personal data? Do I want to give it to them? Are they gonna, and am I going to be able to see what they're doing with it? Most of the times the answer is no. So, in that sense, I think yes, they're wrong and they're making it an unable for us to choose if we do want it or if we don't want it. And that's why the problem lies. And of course, it has a bigger framework in terms of what are you being sold? How are you being sold the image, the product? Who's, who's the brand's owner? It's a complex, it's a complex question or answer, actually, but I think it's not about being wrong. About the information that's extruded from the fact that it's happening. So thank you. Yeah. To add to that, like just a testament of the facade of opting in or the facade of consent. All of these social media apps have community guidelines. What communities are they talking to? You know, this, this idea that they are involving us in the creation of this incessant cycle of like, you know, them pandering to us essentially as if we opted into that with language like community guidelines. That's like one example. Another question about spaces that black and brown people can create either digitally or physically outside of the social norm that excludes us. Yeah, um, I, I mean, again, I'm speaking from my perspective as an online creator and someone who creates content. I found that being able to curate your following. And also the people that you follow is really important. Like, we know that we don't have as much opting in power as we would like to, but we do, there are some measures that we can take to curate our experience to prevent digital harm. I only follow black people on my page because that is a community that I have experienced the least harm from. And so that, that those are some of the ways that you can, you know, incorporate some kind of safety precaution. There are like encryption apps that you can use that have like a backend that prevent any type of data stealing, essentially, but for me as someone who makes money online, it's really hard for me to consider exiling from those spaces because like on the one hand I do experience harm but is paying the bills. So I think that there are ways for you to support black creators on these platforms and create communities that are safe. But you would have to the onus would be on you I don't really know how much has been done really on the social media aspect like the people in the room making Instagram I don't know how many people are concerned really about about that inclusion. And then with my advocacy work. Part of it is I talk about Googling the word great architects and how Google comes up with 40 names and faces and one is a woman and zero are black. And so I went to Google headquarters and asked them why is that the results. And they said Pascal frankly there's none of content that list you all is great. It became one of the kind of powerful parts of my advocacy work was actually to cultivate and find and curate information on women and BIPOC designers and elevate their identities and their contributions to the built environment. And so every time I do a new exhibition and we've done 21 so far, every new location I'm elevating women and BIPOC designers of that location, which provides another kind of realm of kind of curating right this idea that I am pulling information that we all wouldn't have had access to otherwise and saying that sometimes it's not also just about blocking or kind of eliminating or engage with some communities but it's also cultivating another community of information sharing and giving a light to other people who have been kept in the darkness and suffer from that erasure that we've been talking about on the panel discussions. So, I think it's also powerful about creating those communities and so by having this beyond the built IG page of all these people featured I've been been creating a coalition of people who frankly care, right who wants to hear our stories who benefit and learn and are seeing themselves reflected in our narratives and what we share so I think it's also powerful to consider ways of how you can actually cultivate information that we need to know and also share that with everyone. Thank you Pascal, that's a really important call to action for public scholarship. And I encourage everyone to get to know Shinook Pascal and mods work even better. Thank you so much for spending the time with us today all three of you. And I hope we have a chance one day to convene in person to take care, take care everyone. Thank you. Thank you.