It was easy to make something (online) and put it out in public. People want instant gratification.

In 2013, I covered Yung Jake in an Art21 series that looked at artists from around the globe who were inventing new uses for existing technologies, or fashioning new technologies to fit their interests. They were creating new aesthetic forms and new ways to articulate their identities. Fast forward to March 2021 when Beeple AKA Mike Winkelmann auctioned a piece of crypto art at Christie’s for US$69 million. Suddenly, it seemed like everyone was talking about crypto art. …

I grew up in a Southern Baptist church and, as a kid, I yearned to join the youth choir. I wanted to be in the processional on their special night. Each member, in turn, stepped forward, paused, and moved forward diagonally to a new position where they repeated the action in the opposite direction. The result was similar to weaving a textile. Choir members moved into their places behind the pulpit row-by-row, then moved together side-to-side, and this was all done on the beat (rhythm) played by live musicians.

*I didn’t have the knowledge at the time but now I…

February 1 is the start of Black History Month, so I decided to post about heritage algorithms, a term coined by Professor Audrey Bennett (2016). Bennett notes that some cultural artifacts can re-circulate as a form of computational agency. For example, Congolese women who create Kuba textile designs incorporate spontaneity and improvisation in their work to achieve uniqueness and individuality, part of their African aesthetics (Rajagopalan et al.).

Right now I’m listening to a panel of Black women talk about the “power of story” and speculative fiction. The panel is one of several talks and events for Sundance Festival 2021. At the top of the festival last week I had, once again, followed Drexciya down a rabbit hole, through Gerald Donald who isn’t with Sundance but speaks to the spirit of the moment.

One has to be careful when bifurcating fact from fiction because the fiction is a projection of what may one day become fact. The only reason it is fiction is because certain technologies have not…

According to Autodesk, artificial intelligence or AI refers to a broad field of science encompassing a range of subjects from computer science and psychology to philosophy and linguistics. It is primarily concerned with getting computers to do tasks that would normally require human intelligence. Today, there are many subsets of AI, including programs and tools that simulate the neurons in the human brain.

I was living in Brooklyn, New York, in my first solo apartment when I purchased the “Brown Sugar” CD. There used to be a certain vibe in BK. I lived around the block from where The Notorious BIG grew up, off Fulton Avenue. You can see it in the music video for “Juicy.” On the radio, R&B had taken a turn… hip-hop/rap had taken over the airwaves but instead of ‘native tongues’ and ‘boom-bap’ we were bombarded with hyper-capitalism or “bling.” When D’Angelo entered the scene he brought it all together.

The 2019 film, Devil’s Pie begins with a…

This fall I’ve been working with Dramatic Results and teaching middle-school girls about data science and creativity. When introducing the topic, I use my art as an example of data visualization and predictive modeling. The former conveys or represents data sets (i.e., spreadsheets, tables) and the latter trains machine learning models and uses them to make predictions.

I’ve been trying to come up with ways to explain to teachers taking my course that there is creativity and opportunity in failure. Many teachers have been tasked to “teach to tests,” which entails instruction that is devoid of passion and meaning as students are taught information from a stripped-down curriculum. I’ve encountered students who respond negatively to this method and at one time I was one of them.